Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-767nl Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-11T07:41:55.790Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The King's Buttons: The Language of Law in Billy Budd

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Joyce A. Rowe
Get access

Extract

Revolution and law are joined in Billy Budd — and were from its inception. According to the Genetic Text editors, Herman Melville's last work began as a headnote to a ballad about a condemned naval mutineer. Gradually, this kernel evolved into a prose narrative set in 1797, the year of seemingly contagious British naval mutinies — notably Spithead and “The Great Mutiny” at the Nore — that threatened the prosecution of England's naval war against the regicidal French revolutionary forces. By the time Melville had fixed upon these emblematic, modern political events for his scene, the mutineer of the ballad, an older and probably guilty man, had become a very different figure (Hayford and Sealts, 2). Billy Budd's extraordinary qualities now speak to the injustice of his capital sentence, whereas Captain Vere's judgment speaks to the imperative of necessity. This conflict is reflected not only in the doubts of the drumhead court that sentences Billy, but in the arguments of generations of critics and the midrash of commentary the novel has engendered.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 27 , October 2002 , pp. 271 - 301
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2002

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Adler, Joyce. War in Melville's Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 1981.Google Scholar
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Viking, 1963.Google Scholar
Austin, John. “Jurisprudence” and “Essay on the Uses of the Study of Jurisprudence.” The Austinian Theory of Law. Ed. Brown, W. Jethro. London: John Murray, 1906; rept. Littleton, Colo.: Fred B. Rothman, 1985.Google Scholar
Avrich, Paul. The Haymarket Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bailyn, Bernard. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan, ed. Reconstructing American Literary History. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Brodtkorp, Paul Jr, “The Definitive Billy Budd: ‘But Aren't It All Sham?’” Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Ed. and intro. Milder, Robert. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989: 114–26.Google Scholar
Cassirer, Ernst. “Law, State and Society.” The Philosophy of the Enlightenment. Trans. Koellin, Fritz C. A. and Pettegrove, James P.. 1932; rept. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1951.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert M.Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975.Google Scholar
Dryden, Edgar. Melville's Thematics of Form: The Great Art of Telling the Truth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ferguson, Robert. Law and Letters in American Culture. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.Google Scholar
Franklin, H. Bruce. The Wake of the Gods. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963.Google Scholar
Fredrickson, George M.The Inner Civil War. New York: Harper and Row, 1965.Google Scholar
Garner, Stanton. “Fraud as Fact in Herman Melville's Billy Budd.” San Jose Studies 4, no. 2 (05 1978): 83–105.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert W, ed. Introduction to The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992.Google Scholar
Hannay, David. Naval Courts Martial. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914.Google Scholar
Hart, H. L. A. “Positivism and the Separation of Law and Morals.” Harvard Law Review 71, no. 4 (02 1958): 593–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hay, John. The Bread-Winners. 1883; rept. Ridgewood, N.J.: Gregg, 1967.Google Scholar
Hayford, Harrison, ed. The Somers Mutiny Affair. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1959.Google Scholar
Hayford, Harrison, and Sealts, Merton M. Jr, eds. Introduction and notes to Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). By Herman Melville. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Higham, John. Strangers in the Land. New York: Atheneum, 1963.Google Scholar
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr, The Common Law. Boston, 1881; rept. New York: Dover, 1991.Google Scholar
Holmes, Oliver Wendell Jr, “The Soldier's Faith.” Occasional Speeches of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Comp. Mark DeWolfe Howe. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J.The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Horwitz, Morton J.The Transformation of American Law, 1870–1960. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Howe, Mark DeWolfe. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, The Proving Years, 1870–1882. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hurst, James Willard. Law & the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth Century United States. 1956; rept. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Ives, C. B. “Billy Budd and the Articles of War.” Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Ed. and intro. Milder, Robert. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989: 88–93.Google Scholar
Lears, T. J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920. New York: Pantheon, 1981.Google Scholar
Levy, Leonard W.The Law of the Commonwealth and Chief Justice Shaw. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957.Google Scholar
McArthur, John. Principles and Practices of Naval and Military Courts Martial. 2 vols. London, 1805.Google Scholar
McWilliams, John P. Jr, “Innocent Criminal or Criminal Innocence: The Trial in American Fiction.” Law and American Literature. Ed. Bloomfield, Maxwell, McWilliams, John P. Jr, and Smith, Carl. Chicago: Commission on Undergraduate Education of the ABA, 1980.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative). Reading text and genetic text. Ed. Hayford, Harrison and Sealts, Merton M.. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Melville, Herman. Collected Poems of Herman Melville. Ed. Vincent, Howard P.. Chicago: Hendricks House, 1947.Google Scholar
Milder, Robert, ed. Introduction to Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.Google Scholar
Miller, Perry. The Life of the Mind in America. London: Victor Gollancz, 1966.Google Scholar
Mizruchi, Susan. The Science of Sacrifice. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Novick, Peter. That Noble Dream: The “Objectivity Question” and the American Historical Profession. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Painter, Nell Irvin. Standing at Armageddon: The U.S. 1877–1919. New York: W. W. Norton, 1987.Google Scholar
Pohlman, H. L.Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes & Utilitarian Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, Richard A. “Comment on Richard Weisberg's Interpretation of Billy Budd.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 71–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Posner, Richard A.Law and Literature. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998.Google Scholar
Reich, Charles A. “The Tragedy of Justice in Billy Budd.” Critical Essays on Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor. Ed. and intro. Milder, Robert. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989: 127–42.Google Scholar
Reimann, Matthew W. “The Common Law and German Legal Science.” The Legacy of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. Ed: and intro. Gordon, Robert W.. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992: 72–114.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael Paul. Subversive Genealogy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Scorza, Thomas J.In the Time Before Steamships: Billy Budd and the Limits of Politics and Modernity. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1979.Google Scholar
Sebok, Anthony J.Legal Positivism in American Jurisprudence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sealts, Merton M. Jr, “Innocence and Infamy: Billy Budd, Sailor.” A Companion to Melville Studies. Ed. Bryant, John. New York: Greenwood, 1986: 407–32.Google Scholar
Shklar, Judith. Legalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964.Google Scholar
Stern, Milton R. Introduction to Billy Budd, Sailor. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1975.Google Scholar
Thomas, Brook. “Billy Budd and the Judgment of Silence.” Bucknell Review 27, no. 1 (1982): 51–78.Google Scholar
Thomas, Brook. “Billy Budd and the Untold Story of the Law.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 49–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thomas, Brook. “The Legal Fictions of Herman Melville & Lemuel Shaw.” Critical Inquiry 11, no. 1 (09 1984): 24–53.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thompson, Lawrence. Melville's Quarrel with God. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1952.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. 1899; rept. New York: Penguin, 1979.Google Scholar
Wallace, Robert K. “Billy Budd and the Haymarket Hangings.” American Literature 47 (1975): 108–13.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Weiner, Susan. Law in Art: Melville's Major Fiction & Nineteenth-Century Law. New York: P. Lang, 1992.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Richard. “Accepting the Inside Narrator's Challenge: Billy Budd and the Legalistic Reader.” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1, no. 1 (Spring 1989): 27–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
White, G. Edward. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: Law & the Inner Self. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wiebe, Robert H.The Search for Order, 1877–1920. New York: Hill and Wang, 1967.Google Scholar
Wilson, Edmund. Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1962.Google Scholar
Wright, Benjamin F.American Interpretations of Natural Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931.Google Scholar