|
|
Article: Melville's BILLY BUDD, SAILOR.(Critical Essay)(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- September 22, 1999
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1999 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
Nowhere else in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Western literature, except perhaps in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, are male physical beauty and personal charm portrayed with the erotic intensity that they are in Melville's short story "Billy Budd, Sailor." But that in itself is not sufficient evidence that the story is concerned with homosexuality, as some modern critics assert (see Sedgwick; Phillips; and Casarino). There is, for example, no suggestion that either Captain Vere's admiration for Billy's body or the affection Billy's fellow sailors have for him is sexual in nature.
The story does involve homosexuality, but it manifests itself not in the ...