O’Brien Melville Blog

           “Benito Cereno” is a story about control. Specifically, it is about the question of who controls whom in the relationship between a master and a slave. On the ship, the assumption is that the master in the relationship is Cereno and that the Africans on the ship are subdued slaves, a situation that the climax of the story shows to be patently false. One of Delano’s descriptions draw a comparison between the slaves and animals: “His attention had been drawn to a slumbering Negress, partly disclosed through the lace-work of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock.” Delano invests the slaves with the quality of a doe: non-confrontational, peaceful, and unthinking or at least incapable of aggression. It makes Delano feel more comfortable to degrade their humanity, even as the atmosphere abroad the San Dominick suggest some underlying emotions waiting to erupt. As it turns out, the complacency is an act. But why did the slaves wait for another ship for them to attack? They could have chosen to take to the seas and returned home, but they did not. Melville turns the ship into a time bomb, waiting to explode and it completely escapes Delano until violence actually breaks out.            

What masquerades as good versus evil is closer to a struggle between order and chaos. Delano seeks to apply order to the mysterious San Dominick and its crew and by extension to the unknown in general.  An ambiguous universe is a dangerous one, which is something of an ongoing theme throughout American literature. Going back to the Puritans through to Poe, the unknown has this dark, sinister quality. While that outlook has its own problems, Melville uses Delano to show how the same problems can arise from assuming the unknown is inherently nonthreatening.

There is a part near the end of the story where Benito begs Captain Delano not to chase after his ship, “regarding this warning as coming from one whose spirit had been crushed by misery.” Even after the violence enters the picture, Delano continues to believe that what occurred was a sudden betrayal. It does not cross his mind that the violence had been there all along. Delano cannot conceptualize that between the master and the slave, it was the slave who was in control.