Benito Cereno: Why the Historian Should Bother to Read Novels

In his critique of the way historians handle literature, Dominck LaCapra says, “Literature becomes redundant when it tells us what can be gleaned from other documentary sources. In this sense, literature is paradoxically most superfluous when it seems to provide us with the most ‘useful’ and ‘reputable’ information, for it must simply replicate or confirm what can be found in more literal documents such as police reports” (126). This view of literature is clearly contradicted in Melville’s Benito Cereno, in which the first part of the story is told as a narrative from Captain Delano’s point of view and the second part is framed as a legal deposition in a trial. Rather than the narrative and the “documentary source” mutually supporting each other, which would indeed make literature seem “redundant,” the literary narrative contradicts the (fictitious) documentary legal deposition. The narrative thus proves to be extremely important in showing how an American’s racist assumptions make him misread the situation he is in.

Prior to discovering the truth about the slave revolt, Captain Delano interprets the interactions between Don Benito Cereno and Babo as those between a master and his faithful, devoted slave: “As master and man stood before him, the black upholding the white, Captain Delano could not but bethink him of the beauty of that relationship which could present such a spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other” (136). Captain Delano buys into racist assumptions of Africans as willingly servile and inferior. He continuously compares the blacks to animals, and he believes they as a race have a “docility arising from the unaspiring contentment of a limited mind and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors” (201). Delano’s racial stereotyping is not limited to the Africans. When he starts to be suspicious that there is a secret plot to murder him, he blames the Spaniard Benito Cereno, thinking, “these Spaniards are all an odd set; the very word Spaniard has a curious, conspirator, Guy-Fawkish twang to it” (189-90). He oscillates back and forth between the belief that there is a conspiracy to murder him and the belief that he is being ridiculous. At one point, he thinks, “could then Don Benito be any way in complicity with the blacks? But they were too stupid. Besides, who ever heard of a white so far a renegade as to apostatize from his very species almost, by leaguing in against it with negroes?” (181). Because of his racial stereotyping and the belief in the superiority of all whites, even sneaky Spaniards, Delano cannot imagine Benito Cereno actually plotting against him.

 

Captain Delano ultimately does discover that the Africans were in control of Don Benito and the other Spaniards the whole time, and he helps defeat them and capture Babo. The depositions for Babo’s trial tell a completely different story about the situation on the San Dominick than what Captain Delano believed. I found one very interesting contradiction between Delano’s perceptions of the “negresses” and the description of them in the deposition. Delano watches a black woman with her child and thinks, “There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love” (176).  Pleased with what he sees, “This incident prompted him to remark the other negresses more particularly than before. He was gratified with their manners: like most uncivilized women, they seemed at once tender of heart and tough of constitution” (176). The deposition, on the other hand, paints the black women as bloodthirsty and cruel: “the negresses, of age, were knowing to the revolt, and testified themselves satisfied at the death of their master, Don Alexandro; that, had the negroes not restrained them, they would have tortured to death, instead of simply killing, the Spaniards slain by the command of the negro Babo” (260-1). Delano’s racial stereotypes of the black women are too limited; he doesn’t view the black women holistically. However, the deposition, while it seems strictly factual and objective, is also overly limited. It only provides one perspective on the black women, and it doesn’t look into the motivations behind their actions or thoughts. The comparison of the clearly biased narrative with the more subtly biased deposition shows why literature is so important and why historians need to pay attention to it for more than merely content and facts. Literature can provide multiple perspectives on historical situations and shows the limitations inherent in human perceptions. Benito Cereno is a fictitious example of the ways literary narratives and documentary sources can come together. LaCapra would approve of these “variable uses of language that come to terms with—or “inscribe”—contexts in various ways” (127).

 

By the end of Melville’s text, we get to hear the story from the perspective of the American Delano and the Spaniard Benito Cereno; however, we never really get to hear the story from the perspective of one of the Africans. LaCapra argues that we should read novels differently to alert ourselves “to the contestatory voices and counter-discourses of the past” (132). While Benito Cereno gives us a “contestatory voice” from Don Benito, we do not get the true “counter-discourse” that the enslaved Africans could provide. At one point, Babo pities himself, saying, “but poor Babo here, in his own land, was only a poor slave; a black man’s slave was Babo, who now is the white’s” (150). Later on, Captain Delano even pities Babo, exclaiming, “this slavery breeds ugly passions in man.—Poor fellow!” (212). The text undercuts all this pity when we learn that Babo led a brutal revolt and was no longer a slave, but we do not get to see how Babo perceived or justified his own actions. A historian would need to find other literature to provide the missing voice of slaves who revolt, but we can still read Babo’s actions. Homi Bhabha says,

The aim of cultural difference is to re-articulate the sum of knowledge from the perspective of the signifying singularity of the ‘other’ that resists totalization – the repetition that will not return as the same, the minus-in-origin that results in political and discursive strategies where adding-to does not add-up but serves to disturb the calculation of power and knowledge, producing other spaces of subaltern signification. (312)

Although I find Benito Cereno incomplete without Babo’s perspective, Babo’s act of rebellion and the reversal of the readers’ expectations in the second part of the text show how Melville uses cultural difference to add to the story in a way that disturbs the narrative rather than “adding up”. The American Delano could not imagine the Africans as anything but docile, stupid, and inferior. Babo’s actions, whether heroic or barbaric, come from a place of cultural difference to contradict what the insulated American character believes.

 

*I used a free Amazon Kindle Edition of The Piazza Tales for all my in-text citations of Benito Cereno.

Waiting vs. Action in Blake: Or, The Huts of America

As I read Martin Delaney’s Blake: Or, The Huts of America, I noticed an interesting tension between the characters waiting and being active. Early in the novel after Henry discovers his wife has been sold, Daddy Joe says, “God moves in a myst’us way His wundahs to pehaum”, to which Henry replies “He moves too slow for me, Daddy Joe; I’m tired waiting so—” (21). Henry then reappropriates Christianity for his own purposes, arguing, “‘Now is the accepted time, today is the day of salvation.’ So you see, Daddy Joe, this is very different to standing still” (21). After this conversation, Henry takes action by running away and traveling all over the South in hopes of inciting rebellion. His actions are repeatedly referred to with an agricultural metaphor of preparing a field for harvest: “after sowing seeds from which in due season, he anticipated an abundant harvest” (73). However, this metaphor, while it shows Henry as an active player fomenting rebellion, contradicts Henry’s earlier comments about being tired of waiting. Although he’s spreading word and talking to people all over the South, Henry recognizes that now is not the time for rebellion, rather he is “sowing the seeds of future devastation and ruin to the master and redemption to the slave” (83, emphasis mine).

When Henry meets a slave who wants to spring into action and rebel immediately, Henry even says, “You are not yet ready for a strike; you are not yet ready to do anything effective” (105). He further explains, “You must know what, how, and when to do. Have all the instrumentalities necessary for an effective effort, before making the attempt. Without this, you will fail, utterly fail!” (105). Henry’s “action” of traveling across the South talking to various slaves about rebellion seems to be undercut by his contradictory message to wait until the right time to rebel. Although he isn’t just putting trust in the Lord like Daddy Joe in their earlier conversation, he seems to take on the role of Daddy Joe, arguing for the importance of waiting and biding time. The novel never shows any attempt at revolution by the slaves in America, so we cannot see if Henry’s travels served any real purpose in the U.S. However, as he asks questions and serves as a spectator to the horrible condition black slaves are in, the reader too becomes a spectator and can see the evils of slavery. Henry’s role as spectator waiting to act continues even after he leaves the U.S., for example when he’s in Cuba and watches a slave woman who is forced to whip her child: “To all this, Henry was a serious spectator, having twice detected himself in an involuntary determination to rush forward and snatch the infernal thing of torture from the hand of the heart-crushed mother” (170). Henry’s inaction parallels the inaction of many white readers at the time this book was written. By making Henry a spectator who waits to rebel, Delaney can show the reader that, by not doing anything, they are complicit in all of the violence and injustice against black slaves.

Despite the contradictory tension between action and waiting that I saw in Henry, I do not want to be too critical of him. He did try to do something to help his fellow black sufferers, and after reading the secondary sources for this week I better understood why he had to leave the U.S. behind without any sort of rebellion being fulfilled. Dr. Doolen explains,

From within a national model, the very act of opposing the nation tended to reinforce its authority and ideology. The very binarism of antislavery opposition could reinscribe the normativities of white nationalism that it was attempting to negate, since black appeals to natural rights or condemntations of tyranny harkened back to the white nationlist project of the revolutionary era. (156)

Slave rebellions in the U.S. ironically reinforce the American revolutionary rhetoric that excluded black slaves from the freedoms that whites fought for. For this reason, Henry’s slave rebellion needs to cross borders and move to Cuba to have the desired effect of undermining U.S. ideology. As Dr. Doolen cogently argues, “this transnational shift enables Delaney’s narration of a black historical experience that does not refer ultimately to white revolutionary ideology” (157).

 

John Carlos Rowe also makes an important point about why Delaney chose to have Henry move away from the U.S.: “Delaney’s plans for colonies in the American tropics and then in Africa…were designed to serve the political goal of hastening an end to United States slavery by demonstrating the potential economic self-sufficiency of African Americans and reconnecting them with their cultural roots” (86). Delaney’s belief in the potential for blacks to be self-sufficient and in the importance of Pan-African connections is revealed in the second half of the novel, especially when Placido explains to Madame Cordora why anyone of black descent is implied in the term Ethiopian. He even claims,

in Africa their native land, they are among the most industrious people in the world, highly cultivating the lands, and that ere long they and their country must hold the balance of commercial power by supplying as they now do as foreign bondmen in strange lands, the greatest staple commodities in demand…and that race and country will at once rise to the first magnitude of importance in the estimation of the greatest nations. (261)

While Delaney could have had any character in the U.S. make this argument, it has much more force in Cuba, a country that serves as the intermediary between Africa and the U.S. and that is largely populated by people of African descent, many of whom are free and wealthy. In fact, the wealthy quadroon Madame Cordora responds, “I never before felt as proud of my black as I did of my white blood” (262). Cuba becomes a place for black pride in a way that the U.S. cannot. I agree with Ifeoma Nwankwo, who argues, “The point that Delaney makes through his depiction of Cuba is that people of African descent in this hemisphere, regardless of their status, color, or national location, should share in a collective desire for freedom” (586).

 

At first I was annoyed by the lack of a conclusion in Delaney’s novel, but Dr. Doolen’s article made me realize that there is probably no better way it could have ended. Delaney’s conclusion very likely would have ended in failure for Henry and the rebels because antebellum literature “conditions us for the suffering and death of the defiant rebel, for the subsequent translation of the body into a martyr to the broken promise of American liberty and equality” (Doolen 174). Although we are still left waiting for something big to happen at the end, just as I argue we are left waiting from the very beginning, at least “Delaney’s extant novel breaks the affective chain that links the martyr’s suffering and death to political renewal in a U.S. context” (Doolen 174). The novel ends on a hopeful note for the black rebels, and it hints at action that is finally about to occur in Gondolier’s final words that resemble a battle cry: “Woe be unto those devils of whites, I say!” (313).

Transvestism and Masquerade, but not Feminism

Like Michelle and Jessica, I’ve been learning a lot about masquerade in my British literature course this semester, so I wanted to focus my blog post this week on masquerade and transvestism. I found both of our primary texts very intriguing, but I preferred Mary Andrews Denison’s The Prisoner of La Vintresse. What struck me most about this novel is how much agency the female heroine achieves in comparison to our two U.S.-Mexico War texts. Tellingly, the important female characters die at the end of both Lippard’s and Buntline’s texts, whereas Minerva actually saves the day in Denison’s text, the one sensationalist text we read by a female author. At first, I thought Denison’s text was radically feminist, but after rereading Aleman and Streeby’s introduction, I saw that masquerade and transvestism were used to promote other concerns. In discussing the prevalence of female cross-dressed characters in popular literature, Aleman and Streeby explain,

These cross-dressing texts might be considered critiques of normative gender codes, but they are also reactionary re-entrenchments of female roles and the nation’s borders. That is, while transvestism demonstrates that gender is performative rather than natural (as Judith Butler teaches), transnationalism threatens to undermine the sanctity of the nation’s domestic borders and the woman’s place in the home. (xxv)

Denison clearly uses Minerva’s actions to subvert the patriarchal authority she is originally placed under, but I struggled to find an actual example of masquerade or transvestism in the form of cross-dressing. Minerva does disguise herself in New York to protect herself from Don Carlos’s spies, which involves attempting to hide her Spanish blood and making herself look older, but her disguise is still as a woman and seems to be merely an act of self-preservation.

 

I finally realized that the moment Minerva starts to gain agency does involve transvestism, but through a disguise of her voice rather than her appearance:

‘Bring the priest!’ It was a strange fancy, but nevertheless, it occurred to Minerva to repeat the word ‘confess.’ ‘Ah!’ cried the senor, eagerly, ‘are you here, holy father?’ ‘I am,’ said Minerva, in a low voice. ‘No, no—but stop—I see the crown of your head—yes, yes, the shaven head, and the rosary, and the robe’; and here began a confession… (277)

Right before this moment in the text, Minerva seems to have lost all potential agency because she has just been abducted and is being brought back to Cuba. However, Senor Velasquez’s illness gives Minerva the chance to finally assert herself. She comes up with the “strange fancy” to impersonate a Catholic priest through her words using a “low voice”, and Senor Velasquez completes the transvestism for her when he imagines that he actually sees a priest in front of him. Senor Velasquez’s confession reveals not only the location of her fiancé Herman Goreham, but also reveals the truth about her inheritance. Minerva’s discovery that she is a wealthy heiress is ultimately what gives her agency, and she uses her new knowledge when she gets back to her home in Cuba. No written proof or physical force is needed for her to assert her will, only her own verbal acknowledgement that she is in charge. When she encounters her housekeeper, she goes against Don Carlos’s orders, saying, “I am mistress, now” (280). She repeats this assertion of her authority again when she says to Jose, “I am your mistress, now, and Senor Herman is to be brought from La Vintresse, by my orders” (280). The reversal of gender roles then continues, completely turning the reader’s expectations upside down in a typical carnivalesque masquerade fashion: “Since Minerva leads the expedition to free [Herman], the narrative inverts the rules of sensational melodrama, whereby heroic men save endangered women: here the woman rescues the man” (Aleman and Streeby xxvii).

 

While the reversal of gender roles and the female empowerment in Denison’s text is provocative, I do have to come back to the second point Aleman and Streeby make in the quote about cross-dressing that I brought up earlier—the “reactionary re-entrenchments of female roles and the nation’s borders” (xxv). Minerva uses her new power to bring Goreham back to the U.S. Herman is much weaker due to his mishaps in Cuba, “not at all like the brave, handsome” man who left Saratoga (284); however, he’s restored to his rightful place. Aleman and Streeby argue, “Filibustering and U.S. involvement with Cuba, the novel warns, threaten to enervate white American manhood by subjecting young men to the passions of slaveholders and the cruelties of slavery” (xxvii). In addition to the text’s criticism of slavery and American involvement with Cuba, the text also shows that people of mixed blood can reject ties to Cuba. Minerva, half Spanish and half English, gives up her Spanish heritage to assimilate into her husband’s Anglo-American culture. Denison’s novel only uses masquerade and transvestism to restore order and reassert national boundaries. Even Minerva, who had her heroic moment in Cuba, is put back into her traditional gender role when she moves to the U.S. and marries Goreham. We can even assume she’s become more of a submissive wife because her life with Herman is placed in contrast to Don Carlos’s life back in Cuba, where his “willful little wife” Dora “queens” their mansion (284). Goreham and Minerva are also described as making “home an Eden,” which reminds the reader of the creation story in which Eve was made to be the subservient helpmate of Adam. By contrasting the married couple living in the U.S. with the one living in Cuba, Denison concludes her novel with a critique of the extravagance that comes with slavery in Cuba. Denison’s concerns about slavery and American involvement in Cuba take precedence over any potentially feminist concerns.

Uncanniness and Stifled Remorse in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden

In his article “The Other Country: Mexico, the United States, and the Gothic History of Conquest”, Jesse Aleman quotes Lewis Cass articulating ambivalence to the stipulations of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo:

It would be a deplorable amalgamation [uniting the US and Mexico]. No such evil will happen to us in our day. We do not want the people of Mexico, either as citizens or subjects. All we want is a portion of territory, which they nominally hold, generally uninhabited, or, where inhabited at all, sparsely so, and with a population which would soon recede, or identify itself with ours. (Aleman 414)

As Shelley Streeby voices in American Sensations: Empire, Amnesia, and the US-Mexican War, such hopes were a ridiculous fantasy: “evidence proliferated in war representations, which inevitably revealed that Mexico was not a vacant wilderness, that many different peoples already lived there, and that violence would be required to displace them” (58). The relationship between John and Isora in George Lippard’s ’Bel of Prairie Eden illustrates the problems with the belief that the United States could take Mexican territory without adopting any of its people or its heritage. John intends to merely seduce and have sex with Isora in order to enact his revenge on Don Antonio Marin, but he unexpectedly falls in love with her. If Isora is symbolic of the Mexican nation, Lippard’s novel’s conclusion shows that Mexico cannot be objectified; in the process of the US fighting for Mexican land, the different peoples intermingle and the United States is forced to recognize the humanity of the Mexicans, even if by annihilating them.

Aleman discusses how Mexico “appropriately stands in as the US’s uncanny imperial other because the continental proximity of the two countries and their shared revolutionary histories make them estranged national neighbors” (409). He quotes Freud, explaining that the uncanny “is that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar” (409). Aleman argues that Mexico is uncanny because the natives fought for independence just as Americans did against Britain. At the same time, Americans are also forced to identify with the Spanish conquistadors who made Mexico part of their empire. In identifying with both of these groups, Americans are put in a similar position to John; the enemy becomes more human and relatable just as Isora moves from sexualized object to beloved wife. In attempting to deal with the United States’ uncanny resemblance to Spanish conquistadors, popular writers like Lippard

fantasized about heterosexual union between a feminized Mexico and a masculinized United States, they appealed to narratives of gender and sexuality to turn force into consent and conquest into international romance. In this way, they tried to establish distinctions between a rapacious Spanish conquest and an idealized, peaceful, and nonaggressive U.S. relationship to Mexico. (Streeby 65)

Thus, by having John fall in love with Isora and ultimately marry her, Lippard distinguishes John from Don Antonio Marin, the Mexican of Spanish descent who raped John’s sister Isabel and left her without ever offering marriage.

There seems to be hope for peaceful relations between the US and Mexico through the symbolic marriage of John and Isora. John remembers Isabel’s dying words which point to the possibility of forgiveness between the two nations: “Let us forgive, and make such recompense for our wrong as is in the power of man to make. Be kind, very kind to Isora” (194). However, this forgiveness is one-sided and the recompense for their wrongs is not complete because Isabel also says, “let [Isora] never know her brother’s fate” (194). John cannot erase his brutal acts of revenge, he can only hide them. Isora is not given the opportunity to forgive because the history of violence against her brother (and fellow Mexican) is withheld from her. The novel ends with John’s intense guilt. Despite his kindness to Isora, he cries out, “There is no living breast into whose recesses, I may pour the agony of my soul—may pour my horrible secret and my remorse. For Isora—oh God! she is dying” (194). If John’s remorse is read symbolically, it would seem that no amount of kindness toward Mexico after the violent war can erase the guilt that Americans are stuck with. By repressing the truth about the violence against Mexicans and framing the conquest as consensual and paternal, Americans make forgiveness impossible—the Mexicans cannot forgive what the Americans will not admit to.

In addition, Isora’s death shows that a peaceful union is short-lived, if even possible at all. Streeby explains that Lippard’s novel “suggests that romance cannot heal the wounds of war…Force is never plausibly transformed into consent; the violence that structures most of the narrative does not disappear but instead fully implicates the Texas colonizer in the bleak conclusion” (76). She goes on to say, “It is even possible to read this as an antiwar novel if one emphasizes the ending and interprets the escalating revenge plots as an allegory about the futility of the violence between the United States and Mexico” (76). However, I read the ending more cynically as a sign that it is too late for Americans to fix their wrongs against Mexico and that they can’t even admit those wrongs to the Mexicans. John’s hidden remorse is the same remorse that Americans suppress today through the dominant narrative of United States history.