Billy Budd, Foretopman: Re-reading Desire

Herman Melville's Billy Budd is hostile to interpretation (Kelley 2008): ambiguous, posthumous and possibly incomplete, it has left criticism at odds – its symbolisms and allegories sending out messages at times coherent, at times deeply contradictory. Since its publication in 1924 at least two main strands have dominated the critical panorama on the novella, one focused on the legalistic aspects raised by the text and one centered on the homoerotic substratum of the characters' relations instead. Maintaining that, though not erroneous, such schemes tend to leave out portions of meaning in order to comply with an idea of interpretation, this paper aims at offering a third view towards the understanding of a conflictual text in light of desire theories: the role of envy as a leading passion will be analyzed, together with that of identification in the process of identity-making. The concepts of "flexible" and "rigid" identity (Bottiroli 2002; 2006) will be relied on in order to account for the behavior of the three main characters (Billy, Vere, Claggart), including their apparent contradictions and aporias.