Answer To: 1 “Benito Cereno” Essay ENGL 1205.1E: Introduction to Literature (Fall 2021) Dr. Adrian Knapp This...
Sarabjeet answered on Oct 05 2021
Topic: Melville’s treatment of race in Benito Cereno
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Contents
Introduction 2
Melville’s treatment of race in Benito Cereno 2
Conclusion 5
References 7
Introduction
Benito Cereno is a very complicated and meticulously constructed piece of art, which makes it understandable that there are many potential misinterpretations. A fairly frequent one, particularly among 1950s scholars and students confronting the work for the first time, is to mistake the novel for a racist work or to embrace the racial views it portrays.
Melville’s treatment of race in Benito Cereno
Due to Melville's silence about his beliefs, the only way to investigate his racial attitudes is to look for matching thoughts and remarks in his writings. Critics must extrapolate his ostensible opinions on the topic from his fiction and reach conclusions that cannot be substantiated by private commentary. Similarly, to how biographical data cannot be used to support literary interpretations without thorough examination, literary works as the only indicator of a writer's viewpoint are problematic tools as well (Kaiser, 2015).
One possible explanation for Melville's failure to speak out publicly against slavery, and certainly an intriguing point, is his familial relationships. His father-in-law, Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw of Massachusetts, was an important person in his life. Shaw was not only a father figure to Melville after the loss of his father, but also supported him and his family (Fallaha, 2018). In 1851, Chief Justice Shaw returned runaway slave Thomas Sims to his owner in the south, becoming the first Northern court to enforce the newly enacted Fugitive Slave Law. According to some critics, Melville must have disagreed with his father-in-law, but to avoid betraying his mentor and creating family strife, he chose to avoid explicitly addressing the subject of slavery. However, not all critics agree with this assessment: Melville's writings include direct remarks, which he did notwithstanding his relationship with Shaw (Yao, 2015). Interestingly, the letters between Shaw and Melville make no mention of Shaw's work, lending credence to the notion that Melville prioritized family above political thought.
While Typee and Mardi include certain racial caricatures, the 1849 book Redburn has a more realistic picture of blacks and has a lot to say about slavery in the United States (Welsh, 2021). The protagonist is taken aback by the way black people are treated in Liverpool, England: Here, black males interact socially with white women, which would almost definitely result in violence in America. This and many more incidents demonstrate to the protagonist that blacks are treated equally as people, enacting the Declaration of Independence's ideals that the Americans are unwilling to implement. From Redburn forward, Melville's writings draw similarities between the plight of blacks in America and exploited populations of other races. The white characters in Redburn and White-Jacket (1850) suffer the same prejudice that is meant to be reserved for blacks (Santis, 2009). Additionally, Ishmael struggles to determine the racial identities of many of his fellow-men in Moby Dick (1851), and in The Confidence-Man (1857), the racial boundaries between black and white characters are blurred...