Portrayal of John Claggart/ Evil in Melville's "Billy Budd"

 

The villain of Billy Budd is John Claggart- a tall, thin, thirty-five years old man with pale skin and dark hair. Little is known of his early life--adding to the ominous mysteriousness that surrounds his character. Melville presents Claggart as the most inscrutable of all characters in the story. He may have committed “some mysterious swindle” and have “found in the navy a convenient and secure refuge.” The narrator offers speculation and rumour about Claggart, suggesting that he was formerly a prisoner, or perhaps he is not even British (or, by implication, not white). Yet these matters remain rumour and speculation. Because Claggart’s fundamental self cannot be understood, his motivations likewise remain unknowable.

John Claggart, the master-at-arms on the Bellipotent, is a sort of policeman with the duty of preserving order. He looks educated and out of place, “like a man of high quality, social and moral, who for reasons of his own was keeping incog.” He has “jet curls” and a “pallor”--black and white--a polarized and polarizing figure who destroys the order on board rather than preserving it. His complexion “seemed to hint of something defective or abnormal.” He patrols the lower decks and has an “underground influence” through his subordinate corporals. One of Claggart’s “more cunning corporals” below decks is Squeak, who is compared to “a rat in a cellar.”


If Billy is the representative of good, Claggart is the epitome of evil. The serpent in Billy's Eden, Claggart serves as both tempter and destroyer. Melville's comparisons of Claggart to Tecumseh, the Shawnee (treacherous enemy of the English colonists), to Titus Oates (diabolical plotter against Charles II), and to Ananias (shameless liar struck dead by God) clearly and concisely sum up his evil nature. Claggart takes a satanic role in that he tempts Billy to commit the sin of rebellion. Claggart is often connected with serpents, as in the moments after his death when his body sags in the captain's hands like the coils of a dead snake. The fact that Melville leaves Claggart's background a mystery reinforces the idea that the master-at-arms represents a lurking, mesmerizing evil.

Melville portrays Claggart's wickedness as innate and fated rather than informed by any reasonable circumstances. He hates Budd because the young sailor is so good, so beautiful, so innocent. He is subtle in his actions, preferring to antagonize Budd through his subordinates rather than directly. Claggart’s dislike for Billy, the narrator surmises, comes from some inherent “elemental evil”; such evil cannot be explained or avoided but merely exists, built into the man’s fate as stinging is built into the fate of a scorpion.

Since Claggart is careful in hiding his feelings, he has a tendency to assume that other people are motivated by hidden malice. Deeply egocentric Claggart is driven by envy. So he misinterprets that Billy purposely directed the action of spilling soup towards him, whereas soup was spilled by accident. He did not do it deliberately but Claggart for his malice misinterpreted it. One day at dinner, when Billy accidentally spills his soup, Claggart “playfully tapped him from behind with his rattan,” with an “involuntary smile, or rather grimace.” However scholars suspect Claggart has a homosexual attraction to Billy, perhaps ambivalent or frustrated. After all, Melville writes that Claggart “was about to ejaculate something hasty at the sailor, but checked himself...”

 


Several scholars have compared Claggart to the Biblical figure of Judas in his betrayal of the innocent Christ, while others have noted his resemblance to the character of Iago in Shakespeare's Othello, whose jealousy leads to evildoing. Claggart is also comparable to Lucifer envying Adam and Christ in Paradise Lost by Milton. He is identified with the head, an intellectual dissociated from the heart and polarized against it.  Melville’s emphasis on Claggart’s intellect and his understanding of Billy’s moral significance indicates that he is aware of his own evil and that he is doomed.


Read more of Billy Budd:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Banaras Hindu University (BHU) M. A. English Entrance previous years questions papers (2010 to 2019)

Image
Banaras Hindu University: The Capital of All Knowledge Questions papers of previous years are important milestone for any exam. These papers give the students guidelines of which way and how to proceed in their preparation. Going through the questions gives them the insight and clarity needed for any exam. Banaras Hindu University (BHU) is the largest residential university of Asia and has its rank "Third" among all the universities of India. Lots of students have their dreams of becoming a part of this eminent university. So, I am here providing you all with the questions papers of the entrance test following the latest pattern and trend in Post Graduate English Literature. Click the following links to download the respective old question paper:    BHU entrance question_M.A. ENGLISH 2010   https://drive.google.com/file/d/189LtnwP0-QK4qZtq47lLWQViy3wa7TZu/view?usp=sharing   BHU entrance question_M.A. ENGLISH 2011 https://drive.google.com/file/d/13Sk67LcnK6fVc1shFUQhYz_GGDSohu
Read more

Use of Irony in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"

Image
Irony, the use of words to convey an idea that departs from its literal meaning, underpins many of the protagonist’s earliest experiences in Ellison's Invisible Man . In particular, Ellison’s use of structural irony reveals his authorial goals because we, along with the mature writer-narrator whom we meet in the prologue, observe an incredibly naïve central character stumbling towards self-understanding. This pervasiveness of structural irony, or the reader’s perpetual sense of knowing more than the narrator, allows Ellison to have fun as he inserts his protagonist into various conundrums. In addition to injecting bursts of humor, the comic aspects of his narrator’s experiences facilitate Ellison’s artful handling of the weighty issues that he invites readers to explore. The novel’s first episode sets this tone.  In the battle royal scene, the narrator’s earnest recitation of his Washingtonian valedictory speech, one which exhorts his audience of white segregationists to join hands
Read more

Old English Religious/ Christian Poetry (Caedmon, Cynewulf)

Image
    The coming of Christianity introduced the Anglo-Saxons with the Holy Bible that influenced a rich body of Christian literature. After conversion to Christianity the Anglo-Saxon poets turned away from pagan themes, and sought subjects for their poetry in the Bible or in the lives of saints. They did not, however, wholly abandon the pagan sentiments and ideas, but used them after getting them filtered through their new religion. They applied the techniques of Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry to purely Christian themes. As a result, the old English religious poetry shows a great blending of pagan and Christian elements. There are two glaring stars in the sky of Anglo-Saxon religious poetry- Caedmon and Cynewulf.   The story of Caedmon ’s miraculous transformation into the first religious poet of England and his nine-lined Hymn of Creation is contained in Venerable Bede’s Latin work, Ecclesiastical History of the English People.  Caedmon was a layman at the monastery of Whitby around 664 AD.
Read more

Narrative Technique of Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"

Image
  Invisible Man can be seen as a Bildungsroman (novel of education), similar to Voltaire’s Candide , which captures the personal growth and development of the protagonist. The novel focuses on the life of the Invisible Man as a young man and his experiences from adulthood through maturity. The narrator is older now as he reflects on his life story backwards. The novel is framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue. The story opens in the present, switches to flashback, and then returns to the present, but a step forward from the Prologue. Writing down the story has helped the hero to make up his mind about things. Leonard J. Deutsch attributes the complexity of the novel in part to this juxtaposition of perspectives of the “I” of the naïve boy and the “I” of the older, wiser narrator. Warren French has described the formal organization of the narrative as “a series of nested boxes that an individual, trapped in the constricting center, seeks to escape.” Several critics cite the use of v
Read more

Wole Soyinka’s Theatre: the “Fourth Stage”

  The “Fourth Stage” is uniquely Soyinka’s interpretation of Yoruba mythology in which there are four parallel worlds of the living, the dead, the unborn and the chthonic (underworld) realm, where the ambiguities of cultural identities are contested. These worlds exist in a non-hierarchical manner, and their membranous nature allows the dwellers to access these different worlds at will. This interpretation is the central thesis of Soyinka in his essays, “Morality and Aesthetics in the Ritual Archetype”, “Drama and the African Worldview” and “The Fourth Stage”. The main argument is that African myth and ritual (exemplary in Yoruba mythology) are not discrete background cultural objects but form the continuing aesthetic and social foregrounding of African society. By starting off with Nietzsche’s theory of the ritual roots of classical Greek theatre, Soyinka explains the roots of African (Yoruba) ritual tragedy in the myth of Ogun and the sacral rites depicting his prowess in battle
Read more

Significance of the Battle Royal scene in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man"

Image
  Invisible Man is invited to present his valedictorian speech to a group of wealthy white patrons at a Southern gentlemen’s club. When he arrives, however, he is forced to participate in a blindfolded ‘battle royal’ against a group of men he believes to be his ‘peers’: adolescent African American males. The irony of the situation is, he finds no commonality with these youths, only bitter rivalry. The hypocrisy of the Southern socio-economy is figuratively actualised in the poignant symbolism of the young black adolescents, who are induced to beat each other to bloody pulps for the amusement of rich white patrons, with the promise of coins as reward (which, they later discover, are counterfeit). Like many members of the Jazz Age intelligentsia before him, Ellison is interested in satirising the cultural apologue of an American ‘aristocracy’ built on slavery in a pure, high capitalist society where there has never been a decline of the ruling class. The mere prospect of wealth enflame
Read more

Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" as a Bildungsroman (novel of growth/development)

Image
  In the traditional European prototype, coming-of-age is charted through the representation of ordeals and life lessons which the young protagonist or Bildungsheld must overcome in order to achieve their harmonious course of maturation. The American model forgoes this necessity of harmony. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) is one such coming-of-age narrative , following the pedagogical and experiential education of an African American adolescent in the 1920s and 30s. Ellison subverts the inefficiencies of representing race in American literature and culture that had come before him. At the same time, the author illuminates the hypocrisies of racial and ideological identity politics in a post-Abolition American society. The linear temporality of the traditional Bildungsroman form is subverted by Ellison’s reflexive use of direct, first person narration in the present and past tense, featuring an ironic use of the in medias res technique with flashbacks. It is indeed ironic beca
Read more

Important Short Stories (UGC NET Unit III)

Image
  James Joyce Araby The Dead Eveline The Sisters   Mark Twain The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg The Invalid's Story No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger A Dog's Tale A Ghost's Story The Stolen White Elephant   Washington Irving The Devil and Tom Walker The Legend of Sleepy Hollow Rip Van Winkle   Gabriel Garcia Marquez The Handsomest Drowned Man in the World A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings The Woman Who Came at Six O'Clock Eyes of a Blue Dog Death Constant Beyond Love The Autumn of the Patriarch   Ralph Ellison King of the Bingo Game   Saki (Hector Hugh Munro) The Open Window   Joseph Conrad The Secret Sharer   Ernest Hemingway The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber Hills Like White Elephants In Another Country A Clean, Well-lighted Place The Snows of Kilimanjaro The Killers Indian Camp The Undefeated   Ray Bradbury There Will Come Soft Rains
Read more

Nadine Gordimer's "Burger's Daughter": Narrative Technique

Image
  The narrative of Nadine Gordimer’s novel Burger’s Daughter is in two modes of narration ; one is a third person narration by the omniscient author , and the other is by Rosa herself . The latter, Rosa's own narration, is very much in the stream-of-consciousness technique . The double discourse of the private disruptive voice and the public conventional tone informs the narrative structure of the novel. The narration alternates between first person and third person- "My version and theirs". The narration by the omniscient author is like a detached record of the happenings in Rosa Burger's life. The opening is a perfect example of this third person narrative: “ Among the group of people waiting at the fortress was a schoolgirl in a brown and yellow uniform holding a green eiderdown quilt and, by the loop at its neck, a red hot-water bottle. ” But at times, even this detached omniscient authoress penetrates into the labyrinths of Rosa Burger's mind to explore th
Read more

New Trends in English Literature

             The 21 st  century has proved to the world that English literature is no longer the sole province of the imperial England. Although English literature started and flourished in England, it has gone on to sow the seeds of creativity in English in other parts of the world. Interestingly, the English people themselves paved the way for the unexpected developments that we witness today. When the English colonizers went to America, they began to write their own literature of the Americas. Similarly, those English men and women who went to Australia began the process of a new literature called Australian literature. And so is the case with Canada, India, and Africa. With colonization in some parts of the world, especially, Africa and Asia, there emerged a new literature which later came to be known as the Commonwealth literature, New Literature in English, postcolonial literature and so on. Not to be left out, even those countries which were not colonized by the English like Bh
Read more