Billy Budd: What Goes on Behind Closed Doors?

In a recent issue of American Imago, Nathaniel L. Floyd brilliantly establishes the homosexual dimension in the psyche of Billy Budd, the young sailor-hero in Herman Melville's short story.1 It remains, however, to suggest that a homosexual encounter may well have taken place during the course of the story—an encounter involving Billy and Captain Vere. The pertinent passage is the scene in which Captain Vere, after virtually compelling the drumhead court to sentence Billy to death by hanging at sunrise, has a private interview with the handsome sailor—one which the reader is not permitted by Melville to witness, for the door to the stateroom in which Billy is temporarily being held is closed, and we are shut out.

This sudden opacity, in a story otherwise characterized throughout by the most flexible use of the omniscient-author point of view, is in itself highly suspicious. Everywhere else in the story, we have been given complete access to every part of the ship where significant action transpires, from the decks to the tops of the masts and down again to the bowels of the vessel where the men are bunked. Why only here are we suddenly denied to witness the action? On the basis of ruptured aesthetic values alone—the violation of the otherwise consistent point of view—the anomaly invites critical scrutiny. Actually, a look at the two principles involved and at the compelling clue that Melville gives us near the end of the passage leads one to the belief that the author closed off this scene from our prying eyes because, under the moral and literary taboos of the time, he could not reveal the action he appears to be trying to suggest.

Melville says that Vere “may in the end have caught Billy to his heart even as Abraham may have caught young Isaac on