By Levens
Abstract:
The nautical setting of Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd provides a unique space for the queering of distinct lines and orientations. Combining Sarah Ahmed’s theory of spatial sexual orientation in Queer Phenomenology and Foucault’s “heterotopias,” this paper explores the intersections of vertical and horizontal lines as disruptions of distinct sexual identity. Ultimately, I argue that Melville’s ship Bellipotent allows for his protagonist Billy Budd to act as a sexual object rather than a subject, paradoxically representing both queer and heterosexual ends of binary sexuality. In understanding Billy as both a symbol of heterosexuality and homoeroticism, I first look at the opposing spaces aboard the HMS Bellipotent—the high vertical positions of foretopman (Billy’s post) in juxtaposition to the low horizontal gundecks below that “Jimmy Legs” Claggart occupies as Master-at-Arms. I then analyze interactions between Claggart and Billy that motivate the intersections of the two opposing spaces. Finally, I approach both of their death scenes as sites for the establishment and paradoxical dismantling binary sexual identity.
In her book Epistemology of the Closet, (1990) Eve Sedgwick famously reads Herman Melville’s novella Billy Budd (1891) as a queer text, questioning the relationship between “male-male desire” and “hierarchical male disciplinary order” within the British Navy (Sedgwick 94). She argues that “Jimmy Legs” Claggart, the Master-at-Arms, displays homoerotic feelings toward the novella’s titular character, Billy Budd, who, through his murder of Claggart is thus “propelled once and for all across the initiatory threshold and into the toils of [his] phobic desire,” establishing him as an object of queer sexuality (99). Another queer studies scholar, Sarah Ahmed, situates space, direction, and the following of “straight” lines in relation to “sexual orientation” in her book Queer Phenomenology (2006). She notes that queerness is “a sexuality that is bent and crooked,” and as an individual orients their desire toward the same sex, they divert from the “normal” vertical heterosexual line (Ahmed 67). Billy Budd’s setting provides a unique opportunity for the study of sexual orientation, as its nauticality tilts and warps distinct “straight” vertical lines queering them and tilting them towards a horizontal extreme. Similarly, Billy is paradoxically queer and straight, acting more as a symbolic intersection of sexual binaries, making him into a figure of sexual exploration, a desired object, rather than a human subject capable of identifying with a singular sexual orientation.
Billy Budd’s setting on a fictional ship is an inverted space, a representational small society, that alters the norms of reality as it stands outside of it. The waves tossing a ship at sea causes a wobbling effect, distorting the perceptions of those aboard. It becomes a place of warped reality, making it an opportune space to explore deviations from on-land heteronormative regularity. Michel Foucault defines spaces like the ship as “Heterotopias” that are “outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality” (Foucault 4). Melville’s ship Bellipotent, as a fictional space, is outside of all real places, not visitable in a corporeal sense, but its imagery refers to other ships available in the real world. Foucault continues, “these places [heterotopias] are absolutely different from all the sites they reflect and speak about,” especially the “Heterotopia of deviation,” “whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm” (5). Devious heterotopias steer away from the traditional social norms present in the real sites they refer to. Melville’s nautical setting, as a heterotopia, becomes a perfect site for studying “deviant” or queer sexuality that orients itself away from their real referential space, the heterosexual home on land.
Vertical and Horizontal lines make up the ship’s heterotopic space. Within the context of sexuality, these can be indicative of normative pathways and their queer aberrations. According to Ahmed, “the normative dimension can be redescribed in terms of the straight body, a body that appears in line,” seeming “straight (on the vertical axis)” and “aligned with other lines” (Ahmed 66). A normative line, or trajectory that represents heterosexuality, would follow the direction of the other lines drawn before it, as the heterosexual lifepath is historically hegemonic. Furthermore, Ahmed points to the use of horizontal lines to establish marital/sexual relationships, and in the “queer moment,” objects seem “slantwise” making the horizontal axis seem “out of line,” or deviating from the normal (Ahmed 66). In a homosexual sphere, horizontal connecting lines also signal an established sexual relationship, but the horizontal is slanting, or indirectly moving to a sexual point of the established straightforward heterosexual route.
One of the first instances of the novella’s vertical depictions is Billy’s position aboard the ship. His status as foretopman creates a linear metaphor, placing him on a high point of a straight vertical line, the epitome of heterosexual masculinity. The foretop where Billy works is a high platform on the mast of the ship, just below where the topmen stand. The foretop and topmen together “constit[ute] an aerial club…frequently amused with what was going on in the busy world of the decks below” (Melville 221). The foretop connotes a vertical heterosexual authority over the people underneath them, who are made visually queer through their indistinctness when looking down from above. His golden-boy persona aligns with his towering linear straightness on the Bellipotent’s mast as Melville describes the “strength and beauty” of his maleness, as “ashore he was the champion, and afloat the spokeman; on every suitable occasion always foremost” (199). Billy in the aerial position aligned with the straight standing mast is the quintessence of the heterosexual heroic man, strong and just; at sea, he is the peacemaker and leader of his shipmates. Although the usage of “straight” as a term for heterosexuality postdates Melville, his vertical position on the foretop still denotes his strict alignment with the sexual norm.
As Billy stands on the mast in his foretop position, Claggart’s role as the master-at-arms is representative of the ship’s low and horizontal queer axis. Mobile in his management among the sailors of the decks, Claggart is positionally opposite Billy’s high point on the heterosexual vertical axis. Sedgwick points out that he is “obscure” and “secretive,” underscoring his “natural depravity,” which looms in the darkness of the decks below (Sedgwick 94-5). As a Master-at-Arms, Claggart polices the navy men, moving among them but likely not often venturing up the mast. In his interactions with Billy, they are on flat ground, not high in the foretop, and Claggart’s seedy quality puts him characteristically under the cover of darkness and obscurity, opposing the lofty moral greatness of Billy’s highness. Furthermore, Melville’s introduction of the Master-at-Arms is a directional association, as Billy and the readers learn that he is “down” on Billy, and his being “down on [him]” is mentioned another five times before the end of the novella (Melville 224). Claggart’s “downness” supports his queerness in two ways. In the first, it demonstrates his desire to be “down on” Billy, as a body positioned in a sexual act. In the second, his downward quality illustrates a far deviation from Billy’s straight upward movement to the point of complete opposition and orientation away from the foretopman’s epitomical alignment with the “normal” vertical line.
As well as being “down” in terms of queer orientation, Claggart’s linear associations are also indirect, approaching a sexuality that circumvents the straightforward heterosexual pathway. The narrator asserts that Claggart and his motives can’t be comprehended from a “normal nature” (Melville 227). Instead, “to pass from a normal nature to him one must cross ‘the deadly space between,’ and this is best done by indirection” (227). Claggart exists outside “normal nature,” or the straightforward line. To reach him, one must cross over the straight normative sexual boundary and arrive at Claggart’s queer point, through indirection. “Indirection,” according to the OED, is “indirect movement or action; a devious or circuitous course to some end.” Claggart’s indirect linear movement arrives at sexual desire through a deviant route, therefore making him a devious queer character.
Putting these vertical, non-vertical, and horizontal depictions together, Melville juxtaposes Billy’s foretop position with the decks below, creating a linear intersection within the space through the meeting of the horizontal flat decks and the vertical mast, paradoxically implying a queer desire and a heterosexual “straightening.” The intersection invites the possibility of queer connection, as Billy looks down from above, and the other crew members look up at Billy from below. Despite his far-away aerial position, the other sailors look at Billy as an object of desire from the lower decks. Billy was “well received in the top and on the gun-decks…. He was young; and despite his all but fully developed frame, in aspect looked even younger…all but feminine in purity of natural complexion” (205). Sailors desire Billy from multiple positions on the ship, from which he is always attractive in his fresh, almost feminine, beautiful young face. Sailors admire all the “aspects” of his face, and they voyeuristically desire him from all “aspects”/perspectives on board. The intersection between the foretop vertical perspective and the horizontal decks problematizes the sexual binaries of heterosexual and homosexual desire, just as the sailors’ attraction to Billy’s “feminine” features seem heterosexual but are simultaneously homoerotic because he is a man.
Billy’s character embodies intersections and thus invites the crossing of sexual binaries. A critical intersectional sexual moment between Billy and Claggart occurs when they are positionally close, so the Master-at-Arms can directly point to the foretopman as his object of desire. Billy moves downward from the aerial position of the foretop, coming into the lower, darkened, queer space of the below-the-surface gunman deck for dinner, bringing his verticality with him as he meets Claggart at the horizontal decks below.
Billy’s crossing through space, from the foretop to the gun decks, provides opportunity for non-normative sexual desire, and it is literally pointed out through Claggart’s orientation toward him. While at lunch below deck, Billy spills a bowl of soup on the floor as the master-at-arms passes, at first, he keeps walking, until he realizes it was Billy who caused the incident. Realization sets in as “his countenance changed,” in the face of his desired object, and “pausing about to ejaculate something hasty at the sailor, point[s] down at the streaming soup, playfully tapp[ing] him from behind with his rattan,” saying “handsomely done, my lad! And handsome is as handsome did it, too!” (225). Claggart, through the pointing of his rattan, becomes the clear director of his desire, pointing and making his orientation toward his desire direct and obvious. The rattan works metaphorically, an elongated phallic symbol, pointing out Billy as his desired sexual object, and creating a physical line of connection between the two of them within the dining space of the ship. He points the rattan at Billy, “playfully tapp[ing] him from behind” (225). Claggart hits Billy’s body, selecting it as the object of his desire, and the playful quality of the interaction denotes a mischievous sexual insinuation, as he is positioned behind Billy. Furthermore, Claggart’s site of orientation in the scene is explicitly made sexual through Melville’s use of “ejaculate” and “streaming,” along with his admitting that Billy is “handsome,” solidifying their relation and direction toward one another during the dinner as an erotic spatial interaction (225). Melville even underscores the setting of the scene as one of passion, as he notes, “passion at its profoundest, is not a thing demanding a palatial stage…. In the present instance the stage is a scrubbed gun-deck,” and “a man-of-war’s man’s spilled soup” (231). Melville confirms that passion, an affect with sexual implications, is present on the ship’s deck, and the soup acts as the “provocation” for the demarcation of queer desire (231).
Symbols of intersection surround Billy’s person at multiple points throughout the novella, including the scene between him and Claggart during lunch. When Billy spills the soup, the “greasy liquid stream[s] just across [Claggart’s] path” and, “stepping over it, he proceed[s] on his way without comment, since the matter was nothing to take notice of under the circumstances” before identifying Billy as the culprit (225). The soup streams horizontally across the straightforward path of Claggart’s walking, creating an intersection between the movement of his body and the soup’s eroticized greasy streaming liquid, reminiscent of bodily processes. Billy’s action, spilling the soup, creates an intersection that includes Claggart, setting up a directional sexual crossroads that invites him to step over and across the sexual threshold and choose him as the object of his desire, which afterwards Claggart solidifies through pointing his rattan at him. Billy’s character then is not a site for confirmed sexual identification but rather an active propositional sexual object that transgresses the defined linear boundaries of desire.
Billy’s role in Claggart’s death scene invokes another sexual intersection, further distinguishing Claggart as a deviational queer character aboard the Bellipotent. Sedgwick makes his murder into the pivotal queer-affirming moment that “propels” Billy as a sexual object into the throws of Claggart’s homosexual desire, and the literal change in bodily orientation underscores her assertion (Sedgwick 99). When Billy punches Claggart, killing him, his “body fell over lengthwise, like a heavy plank tilted from erectness” (Melville 250). Claggart’s falling signals a homoerotic slotting into place, as his stiff body forms a straight line, like a board, being a physical bodily enactment of the heterosexual “straight” vertical line queerly falling into the horizontal. Melville also describes his body as “erect,” invoking phallic imagery and making a kind of pointing arrow that follows the tipping over of his body.
Billy’s instigation of the climactic scene of Claggart’s murder creates a site of intersection, again confusing his orientation, underscoring his status as a malleable sexual object rather than a firmly set subject capable of a defined sexuality. Before throwing the punch, Billy stands vertically upright, the “young athlete’s superior height,” towers over Claggart as he delivers the blow, making him the paradoxically straight catalyst of the violent queer fall (250). Furthermore, his face and form embody a linear intersection as his facial expression “was a site of crucifixion to behold,” and next his “right arm shot out” from his straight standing body (250). A cross is the epitomic symbol of a “crossing” of an individual vertical and straight-line intersecting, and along with his face, Billy’s body also forms a cruciform shape as his arm extends horizontally out from his side, creating a perpendicular line intersecting with his torso. His embodied intersection points toward the metaphorical sexual intersection and paradoxes within the scene, as Billy’s sexually objectified form changes shape, his vertical standing body abruptly forming a cross as he punches Claggart, instigating the master-at-arms’s queer deviation.
Like Claggart’s, Billy’s death is also a climactic scene of sexual intersection and paradox, through its both hetero- and homosexual directional imagery. Billy is killed through hanging, which opposes Claggart’s horizontal death, and calls back to his foretopman position on the mast. In one way, it realigns and situates him on the straight vertical axis, confirming his loyalty to both naval authority and heterosexual desire. In the act of a hanging, the offender’s body is limply in a vertical position, held by their neck, with the arms down at the sides, creating a straight line. Before the hanging commences, Billy is at the “penultimate moment,” both at the brink of death and the breaking point of a tension between staying true to his honor (and his heterosexuality) or confessing to mutinous activity (a treason against “normal” sexuality). He cries out, “God Bless Captain Vere!” verbally signaling his choice to stay “straight,” sexually and honorably in his position in the Navy, as his hanging body becomes a symbol for his sexual realignment with the vertical heterosexual norm (272). Thus, saved from sexual deviation and the marked reputation of a traitorous sailor, Billy “ascend[s]; and ascending, took the full rose of dawn” (273). In the end, because of his choice to adhere to heterosexual expectation, Melville angelizes him as alas, “the angel must hang!” but honorably so, as he continues to move upwards on the hetero-vertical axis, ascending upwards for eternity (252).
However, Billy’s death scene is paradoxically queer, as it can be read as a homoerotic climax. In his introduction for the Penguin Classics Edition, Coviello notes that Captain Vere’s sentencing Billy to hang, “might detect something of [his] own reflexive violence, his own inner shrinking from the ardor young Billy provokes in him,” “his insistence on the necessity of law is, on this reading, a cover story,” that hides his shame surrounding his own homoerotic feelings for Billy (Coviello xxiii). Therefore, Billy’s execution has homosexual tones, and the simultaneous covering up and performance of them. Vere’s attempt to stop his homosexual desire for Billy through his execution paradoxically leads to a homoerotic climatic display, as Billy’s body ejaculates “ascended; ascending,” upwards as he “resonant[ly] echo[es]” the captain’s name, all the while Billy’s fellow sailors, a group of men, watch the sexually evocative image (273). The homoerotic display of Billy’s death contradicts and complicates the previous reading of his hanging which had realigned him sexually on the straight normative axis.
It follows then that it is more effective not to classify Billy as a sexual subject at all, as he possesses neither a heterosexual (vertical) nor homosexual (deviant/horizontal) identity. Rather, he is a symbol of intersection, always at a point of climax, a sharp, quick-changing sexual object that crosses binaries and sexual boundaries. His simplistic typing as the “handsome sailor” makes him into an alterable blueprint, capable of “accept[ing] the spontaneous homage,” and embodying the desires of his shipmates (198). He acts more as an object of desire, receiving the emotions of others, rather than a human subject capable of producing his own feelings or identity.
The symbolic intersections surrounding him in the text aim to illustrate his malleable objective quality, with the most evocative scene being his execution. As aforementioned, his hanging can paradoxically be read through a queer lens or as an alignment with the social norm, intersecting both a vertically “straight” and non-straight ideology. The intersection is further made visible as his execution takes place at “four o’clock in the morning,” a number when drawn out, is made up of two vertical lines, and one horizontal, creating two points of intersection, representative of the two sexual binaries coming together (272). Melville’s deliberate mention of four being the hour at which Billy’s hanging occurs points toward his establishment of Billy as a boundary-crossing sexual object.
The above explorations could not have been made without the nonreal, non-normative circumstances of the Bellipotent’s heterotopic setting, and Melville underscores his novella’s unique but necessary setting in the twisted news story of the News from the Mediterranean column at the end of the novella. The news column inaccurately reports Billy and Claggart’s deaths aboard the ship, as the truth of the sexual desires that crossed normative boundaries leading up to the two sailors’ demises were only permitted precisely because they existed in a deviated nonreal sphere. The column thus falsely reports, “Claggart, in the act of arraigning [Billy] before the captain was vindictively stabbed to the heart by the suddenly drawn sheath-knife of Budd” (279). Those present on the ship will remember that Billy’s punch killed Claggart. Billy did not stab him. The “real” story behind Claggart’s and Billy’s relationship including the master-at-arms’s murder is too controversial for the news of the non-heterotopic world to handle, so their reports must be false.
Yet, Melville’s made-up story in the news column is tongue-in-cheek, as the falsified report is almost more erotic than the original. Again, he creates a symbol of intersection, Budd holds his sheath knife perpendicular to Claggart’s chest, literally intersecting and penetrating his flesh. The inserting motion is homoerotic, along with the entrance point being Claggart’s heart, the organ of love and desire. In the final pages, Melville creates a paradoxical scene that can be read to “straighten” normative sexual behavior and/or simultaneously represent queer desire. On all fronts, Billy is the active sexual object within the heterotopic space making the conflictive crossing of sexual boundaries possible.
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. “Sexual Orientation.” Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006.
Coviello, Peter. “Introduction.” Billy Budd, Bartleby, and Other Stories. Penguin Classics, 2016.
Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias.” Architecture /Mouvement/
Continuité, 1984.
Melville, Herman. “Billy Budd.” Herman Melville: Four Short Novels. Bantam Books, 1963.
“Indirection, N., Sense 1.a.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, July 2023,
https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/4049237055.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofky. “Some Binarisms: Billy Budd: After the Homosexual.” Epistemology of
the Closet. University of California Press, 1990.
Bio
Levens is a MAPH alum and co-editor of Common Forms. She is a regular 2-stepper at Honky Tonk Happy Hour in Chicago and loves the boyband One Direction.