ellauri107.html on line 242: In surveying Billy, “sometimes [Claggart’s] melancholy expression would have in it a touch of soft yearning, as if [he] could even have loved Billy but for fate and ban.” Evidently, Claggart has not fully disguised his private appreciation of Billy; but, because he believes something forbids any future for such feelings, he hardens his heart more and more fiercely toward the object of his desire. What “fate” and what “ban” does his misguided imagination perceive? Do their roles on the ship or elsewhere in society somehow doom any intimacy between them? Or does Claggart just presume Billy could never reciprocate his feelings? Might the Master at Arms simply despise sexuality in general and homosexuality in particular and, as a result, find himself driven all the more mad by his uncontrollable “yearning”? Whatever the accurate diagnosis, it is clear that Claggart distorts any positive feelings he possesses for Billy into negative ones with terrible consequences.
ellauri107.html on line 244: Claggart’s repressed, closeted attraction to Billy finds parallels with some interpretations of Hawthorne’s evident spurning of Melville’s too intimate attentions and Hawthorne’s character in The Blithedale Romance Coverdale’s similar rejection of the invitation from Holingsworth to be his “friend of friends, forever.” For Melville, Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale’s agonizing acknowledgement of adultery must have seemed a stunning parallel with what later generations would term “coming out of the closet.” Whether Hawthorne himself were a closeted gay man, it is clear that Melville was relatively open in his affections for the senior author and that those affections were somehow turned away and seem to have left a wound that never fully healed. The evils of the closet constitute a subtext in Billy Budd that may well have brought to its author’s mind the sad sundering of his closeness with Nathaniel Hawthorne.
ellauri107.html on line 246: Billy Budd provides an implicit indictment of the culture, whether military or civil, that encourages the kind of closet where a Claggart so readily succumbs to his “depravity according to nature.” Captain Vere likewise shows a closed, perhaps also “closeted” mind as ready prey for the phenomenon of evil. In Vere’s presence, as Billy is struck dumb by Claggart’s accusation, Claggart is struck dead by a single blow from Billy’s fist, the only response he can muster to defend himself. Although Vere cherishes Billy as “an angel of God” and knows him to be innocent of Claggart’s charges, he resists any bending of rules to protect him against the harshest of consequences for his act of insubordination. Ruthlessly silencing the dictates of his heart, “sometimes the feminine in man,” Vere effects what Claggart’s malice alone could not -- Billy’s total destruction.
ellauri107.html on line 250: Billy is first the victim of Claggart’s closet, one with similarities to the Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover kinds that project self-loathing onto their targets. Vere’s condition, on the other hand, while containing degrees of benevolence, ultimately emerges as more deadly than Claggart’s. Associating his heart with his hated feminine side, Vere crushes down his capacity for love and compassion with a thoroughly brutal, Night-of-the-Long-Knives sort of intolerance. He, who would never have initiated Billy’s demise, will not permit his own ardor to soften his inflexible judgment, as that would evidently equate with irresolution and weakness. After all, he might rationalize, he is the Captain and the Captain has an image to uphold – right? Forget justice; forget humane treatment; maintaining machismo holds precedence over all! And the tragic result: mindless, meaningless, totally unnecessary suffering and loss on the altar of nothing less than evil itself!
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