Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-25T06:12:25.192Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Men and Coats; or, The Politics of the Dandiacal Body in Melville's “Benito Cereno”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Abstract

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1999

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

Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. Trans. Miller, Richard. New York: Hill, 1975.Google Scholar
Bryant, John. Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Burke, Kenneth. A Rhetoric of Motives. Berkeley: U of California P, 1969.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. “Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.” The Works of Thomas Carlyle. Vol. 16. New York: Collier, 1897. 461–94.Google Scholar
Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1834–1872. Vol. 1. Boston: Ticknor, 1886.Google Scholar
Davis, Merrell R., and Gilman, William H., eds. The Letters of Herman Melville. New Haven: Yale UP, 1960.Google Scholar
Delano, Amasa. A Narrative of Voyages and Travels, in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres: Comprising Three Voyages Round the World, Together with a Voyage of Survey and Discovery in the Pacific Ocean and Oriental Islands. Boston: E. G. House, 1817.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “The American Scholar.” The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Spiller, Robert E. Vol. 1. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1971. 4970.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Sealts, Merton M. Jr. Vol. 5. Cambridge: Belknap–Harvard UP, 1965.Google Scholar
[Ford, Richard]. Rev. of History of Spanish Literature, by George Ticknor. Quarterly Review 87 (1850): 289330.Google Scholar
[Foster, George G.]. New York in Slices: By an Experienced Carver: Being the Original Slices Published in the N. Y. Tribune. New York: Graham, 1849.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage, 1979.Google Scholar
Franklin, H. Bruce. The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1963.Google Scholar
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830–1870. New Haven: Yale UP, 1982.Google Scholar
Karcher, Carolyn. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville's America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville, 1819–1891. Vol. 1. New York: Gordian, 1969.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. “Benito Cereno.” The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Lib., 1987. 46117.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade. Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Lib., 1984.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. Pierre; or, The Ambiguities. Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Lib., 1971.Google Scholar
Melville, Herman. White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-of-War. Evanston: Northwestern UP; Chicago: Newberry Lib., 1970.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Miscellaneous item. New York Journal 9 Oct. 1853: 101.Google Scholar
Moers, Ellen. The Dandy: Brummell to Beerbohm. London: Seeker, 1960.Google Scholar
Rawson, Claude. Satire and Sentiment, 1660–1830. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Robbins, Bruce. The Servant's Hand: English Fiction from Below. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Rogin, Michael. Subversive Genealogy: The Politics and Art of Herman Melville. New York: Knopf. 1979.Google Scholar
Story, Ronald. The Forging of an Aristocracy: Harvard and the Boston Upper Class, 1800–1870. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Stult.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989.Google Scholar
Sundquist, Eric. To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1993.Google Scholar
Taylor, William R. Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character. New York: Braziller, 1961.Google Scholar
Tomc, Sandra. “An Idle Industry: Nathaniel Parker Willis and the Workings of Literary Leisure.” American Quarterly 49 (1997): 780805.Google Scholar
Veblen, Thorstein. The Theory of the Leisure Class. London: Allen, 1957.Google Scholar
Webster, Daniel. The Papers of Daniel Webster: Speeches and Formal Writings. Ed. Wiltse, Charles M. Vol. 2. Hanover: UP of New England, 1988.Google Scholar
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence. New York: Collier, 1993.Google Scholar
Williams, Stanley T.Cosmopolitanism in American Literature before 1880.” The American Writer and the European Tradition. Ed. Denny, Margaret and Gilman, William. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1968. 4562.Google Scholar
Willis, Nathaniel Parker. “Who Are the Upper Ten Thousand?New York Mirror 22 Feb. 1845: 314.Google Scholar
Zagarell, Sandra. “Reenvisioning America: Melville's ‘Benito Cereno.‘Critical Essays on Herman Melville's “Benito Cereno.” Ed. Burkholder, Robert E. New York: Hall, 1992. 127–45.Google Scholar