"Dead Then I'll Be": Billy Budd and the Death of Politics

Many critics see Billy Budd's concluding ballad, "Billy in the Darbies," as a rebuttal of the novel's penultimate chapter, a naval chronicle that depicts Billy as a criminal. Such readings reinforce the view that Melville's works valorize democratic collectives over top-down tyranny. This essay argues that the poem mirrors the chronicle's counterrevolutionary function, implying a more nuanced understanding, on Melville's part, of the risks of popular sovereignty. First, the essay takes up Sharon Cameron's claim that the poem is a "radical" dramatization of Billy's "impersonality" to demonstrate instead that this putative radicalism echoes the conservatism of "testament of acceptance" readings of the story, which justify Captain Vere's authority by obscuring the all-too-personal details of Billy's hanging. Next, the essay turns to a discussion of Thomas Hobbes and his notion that a condemned man has a right to resist his executioners. Even in the Hobbesian world of the Navy's benevolent autocracy, Billy's execution would raise the specter of legitimate revolt—a threat dispelled in the ballad by Billy's acquiescence to his fate. By obscuring the role of death in politics, the ballad effects the death of politics, neutralizing the crew's revolutionary potential and preventing critics from facing up to Melville's account of democracy's inescapable contingency.