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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 1
BILLY BUDD & TYPEE
Notes
including
• Life and Background of the Author
• Introductions to the Novels
• Brief Synopses
• Lists of Characters
• Critical Commentaries
• Character Analyses
• Critical Essays
• Essay Topics and Review Questions
• Selected Bibliographies
by
Mary Ellen Snodgrass, M. A.
Former Chair, Department of English
Hickory High School
Hickory, North Carolina
LINCOLN, NEBRASKA 68501
1-800-228-4078
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ISBN 0-8220-7026-x
© Copyright 1991
by
Cliffs Notes, Inc.
All Rights Reserved
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 2
LIFE AND BACKGROUND OF THE AUTHOR
The Early Years. From early times, Herman Melville, like countless other lonely, contemplative, and
misunderstood wanderers, was drawn to the sea. A reserved, bookish, skeptical man, he was never given
to easy answers or orthodox religious beliefs. He was a striking figure--average in height with a full,
curling brown beard, cane, and ever-present Meerschaum pipe. His merry blue-green eyes and cheerful
sociability brought him many friends and partners for games of whist.
He was a faithful letter writer and established a reputation as a mesmerizing teller of tales. He gave full
range to his imagination, as demonstrated by his comment about the writing of Moby-Dick: "I have
a sort of sea-feeling. My room seems a ship's cabin; and at nights when I wake up and hear the wind
shrieking, I almost fancy there is too much sail on the house, and I had better go on the roof and rig in
the chimney." Yet, as he grew older, he drew into himself, in part a reaction to personal troubles and
literary anonymity.
Born August 1, 1819, on Pearl Street in New York City near the Battery, Melville was the third child of
eight children, four boys and four girls, and a descendant of respectable Scotch, Irish, and Dutch colonial
settlers. He was the grandson of two Revolutionary War leaders, one of whom participated in the Boston
Tea Party. His father, Allan Melvill (as the name was originally spelled), a snobbish, shallow man, was an
importer of French luxury items, including fine silks, hats, and gloves. He suffered a mental breakdown,
caught pneumonia, and died broke in 1832, owing nearly $25,000 and leaving destitute his wife, Maria
Gansevoort Melville. An aristocratic, imperious, unsympathetic woman, she moved in with her well-to-do
parents, who helped educate and support her brood.
For two years, young Melville attended the Albany Classical School, which specialized in preparing
pupils for the business world. He displayed no particular scholarliness or literary promise, but did join a
literary and debate society as well as submit letters to the editor of the Albany Microscope. From a
boyhood of relative affluence, he underwent a rapid fall in social prominence as his family accustomed
itself to genteel poverty. Ultimately, Herman and his brother Gansevoort had to drop out of school to help
support the family.
Melville enrolled at Lansingburgh Academy in 1838 and, with ambitions of helping to construct the Erie
Canal, studied engineering and surveying. He graduated the next year and worked briefly as a bank clerk
and salesman, as a laborer on his Uncle Thomas' farm, clerk in his brother's fur and hat store, and as an
elementary school teacher. During this period, he also dabbled in writing and contributed articles to the
local newspaper.
A Life at Sea. In Melville's late teens, his mother's worsening financial position and his own inability to
find suitable work forced him to leave home. In 1839, he signed on as cabin boy of the packet St.
Lawrence. His four-month voyage to Liverpool established his kinship with the sea. It also introduced
him to the shabbier side of England as well as of humanity, for the captain bilked him of his wages.
A deep reader of Shakespeare, French and American classics, and the Bible, he returned to New York and
tried his hand as schoolmaster at Pittsfield and East Albany. Again disappointed in his quest for a life's
work and stymied by a hopeless love triangle, he returned to the sea on January 3, 1841, on the whaler
Acushnet's maiden voyage from New Bedford, Massachusetts, to the South Seas. This eighteen-month
voyage served as the basis for Moby-Dick.
In July 1842, at Nukuheva in the Marquesas Islands, he and shipmate Richard Tobias "Toby" Greene
deserted ship to avoid intolerable conditions and a meager diet of hardtack and occasional fruit. They
lived for a month under benign house arrest among the cannibalistic Typees. With his Polynesian
mistress, Melville enjoyed a few carefree months as a beach bum. During this sojourn, he distanced him-
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 3
self from the Western world's philosophies as well as nineteenth-century faith in "progress."
Melville escaped the Typees aboard the Lucy Ann, an Australian whaler not much better than his former
berth. He became embroiled in a mutiny, was jailed for a few weeks in a British prison, and deserted ship
a second time in September 1842 at Papeete, Tahiti, along with the ship's doctor, Long Ghost. For a time,
he worked as a field laborer and enjoyed the relaxed island lifestyle.
Leaving Tahiti, he sailed on the Charles and Henry, a whaler, off the shores of Japan, then on to Lahaina,
Maui, and Honolulu, Hawaii. To earn his passage home, he worked as a store bookkeeper and a pinsetter
in a bowling alley. He was so poor that he could not afford a peacoat to shield himself from the cold gales
of Cape Horn. In desperation, he fashioned a coat from white duck and earned for himself the nickname
"White Jacket."
The events of the final leg of the journey tell much of the young man's spirit. At one point he was in
danger of a flogging for deserting his post until a brave seaman intervened. In a second episode, Captain
Claret ordered him to shave his beard. When Melville bridled at the order, he was flogged and manacled.
Crowning his last days at sea was an impromptu baptism when he fell from a yardarm into the water off
the coast of Virginia.
The Literary Years. As an ordinary seaman on the man-of-war United States, Melville returned to
Boston in October 1844, where he resumed civilian life. Still, his imagination continued to seek refuge on
the waves under a restless sky. In 1846, from his experience among the cannibals, he composed Typee: A
Peep at Polynesian Life, the first of four semi-autobiographical novels. The book opened the world of the
South Seas to readers and went into its fifth printing that same year, yet earned only $2,000. Although it
had no erotic passages, his work met with negative criticism from religious reviewers who attacked
another element--his description of the greed of missionaries to the South Pacific.
The favorable reaction of readers, on the other hand, encouraged Melville to produce more blends of
personal experience and fiction: Omoo (1847), which is based on his adventures in Tahiti, Redburn
(1848), which describes his first voyage to England, and White-Jacket (1850), which led to an act of
Congress banning the practice of flogging in the U.S. Navy. One of his fans, Robert Louis Stevenson, was
so intrigued by these and other seagoing romances that he followed Melville's example and sailed to
Samoa.
On August 4, 1847, Melville married Elizabeth "Lizzie" Shaw, daughter of Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of
the commonwealth of Massachusetts, to whom Typee is dedicated. The Melvilles honeymooned in
Canada and settled in New York City on what is now Park Avenue South, where they spent the happiest
years of their marriage and enjoyed intellectual company, including William Cullen Bryant, Richard
Henry Dana, and Washington Irving. Their first child, Malcolm, was born in 1849. A second son,
Stanwix, was born in 1851, followed by two daughters, Elizabeth in 1853 and Frances in 1855. In 1850,
the Melville family moved to "Arrowhead," a large, two-story frame house on a heavily wooded 160-acre
farm near Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Among his New England peers, including Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Maria Sedgwick, Melville established a reputation for honesty, courage,
persistence, seriousness of expression and purpose and was, for a time, numbered among the
Transcendentalists.
By the late 1840s, Melville, well established as a notable author of travel romances and a contributor of
comic pieces to Yankee Doodle magazine, became known as "the man who had lived among the
cannibals." However, the public's reaction to his experimentation with satire, symbol, and allegory in
Mardi (1849) gave him a hint of the fickleness of literary fame. Victorian readers turned from his cynical
philosophy and dark moods in favor of more uplifting authors. His own wife, who lacked her husband's
philosophical bent, confessed that the book was unclear to her. After the reading public's rejection, he
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 4
voiced his dilemma: "What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether,
write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches."
On an outing in the Berkshire Mountains, Melville made a major literary contact. He met and formed a
close relationship with his neighbor and mentor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose work he had reviewed in an
essay for Literary World. Their friendship, as recorded in Melville's letters, provided Melville with a
sounding board and bulwark throughout his literary career. As a token of his warm feelings, he dedicated
Moby-Dick (1851), his fourth and most challenging novel, to Hawthorne.
Melville attempted to support not only his own family but also his mother and sisters, who moved in with
the Melvilles ostensibly to teach Lizzie how to keep house. In a letter to Hawthorne, Melville complains,
"Dollars damn me." He owed Harper's for advances on his work. The financial strain, plus immobilizing
attacks of rheumatism in his back, failing eyesight, sciatica, and the psychological stress of writing Moby-
Dick, led to a nervous breakdown in 1856. The experience with Mardi had proved prophetic. Moby-Dick ,
now considered his major work and a milestone in American literature, suffered severe critical disfavor.
He followed with Pierre (1852), Israel Potter (1855), The Piazza Tales (1856), and The Confidence Man
(1857), but never regained the readership he had enjoyed with his first four novels.
Shunned by readers as uncouth, formless, irrelevant, verbose, and emotional, Moby-Dick was the nadir of
his career. Alarmed by the author's physical and emotional collapse, his family summoned Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes to attend him. They borrowed money from Lizzie's father to send Melville on a
recuperative trek to Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; however, his health remained tenuous.
Later Years. Depressed, Melville traveled to San Francisco aboard a clipper ship captained by his
youngest brother, Tom, lectured about the South Seas and his European travels, wrote poetry, and in vain
sought a consulship in the Pacific, Italy, or Belgium to stabilize his failing finances. With deep-felt
patriotism, he tried to join the Navy at the outbreak of the Civil War, but was turned down.
He returned to New York City in 1863 and for four dollars a day served at the Gansevoort Street wharf
for twenty years (from 1866-86) as deputy inspector of customs, a job he characterized as "a most
inglorious one; indeed, worse than driving geese to water." The move was heralded by a carriage
accident, which further diminished Melville's health. He grew more morose and inward after his son
Malcolm shot himself in 1866 following a quarrel over Malcolm's late hours. His second son, Stanwix,
went to sea in 1869, never established himself in a profession, and died of tuberculosis in a San Francisco
hospital in February 1886.
Melville mellowed in his later years. A relative's legacy to Lizzie enabled him to retire. He took pleasure
in his grandchildren, daily contact with the sea, and occasional visits to the Berkshires. When the New
York Authors Club invited him to join, he declined. He became more reclusive as he composed his final
manuscript, Billy Budd, a short novel about arbitrary justice, which he completed five months before his
death. It was dedicated to John J. "Jack" Chase, fellow sailor, lover of poetry, and father figure. Melville
died of a heart attack on September 28, 1891, without reestablishing himself in the literary community.
He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the north Bronx; his obituary occupied only three lines in the
New York Post.
Billy Budd, the unfinished text which some critics classify as containing his most incisive
characterization, remained unpublished until 1924. This novel, along with his journals and letters, a few
magazine sketches, and Raymond M. Weaver's biography, revived interest in Melville's writings.
Melville's manuscripts are currently housed in the Harvard collection.
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 5
A MELVILLE TIME LINE
1819 Herman Melvill is born in New York City on August 1, the third child and second son of Allan
and Maria Gansevoort Melvill.
1830 The Melvill family moves to Albany.
1832 Allan Melvill dies. Maria and her eight children move to Albany to be closer to the Gansevoorts.
1838 Melville enrolls at Lansingburgh Academy to study engineering and surveying.
1839 Melville sails for Liverpool aboard the St. Lawrence and returns four months later.
1841 Melville sails from New Bedford, Massachusetts, aboard the whaler Acushnet on January 3.
1842 Melville and Richard Tobias Greene jump ship in the Marquesas Islands. In July, Melville sails
aboard the whaler Lucy Ann for Tahiti and is involved in a crew rebellion. In September, he
jumps ship in Papeete, Tahiti.
1843 Melville does odd jobs in Honolulu before enlisting in the U.S. Navy aboard the frigate United
States.
1844 Melville is discharged from the Navy in Boston in October.
1846 Melville publishes Typee.
1847 Melville publishes Omoo. He marries Elizabeth Shaw and settles in New York City.
1848 Melville publishes Redburn. He journeys to Europe.
1849 Melville publishes Mardi. His son Malcolm is born.
1850 Melville publishes White-Jacket. He purchases "Arrowhead," a farm outside Pittsfield,
Massachusetts, and forms a friendship with his neighbor Nathaniel Hawthorne.
1851 Melville publishes The Whale, then reissues it under the title Moby-Dick. Melville's second son,
Stanwix, is born.
1852 Melville publishes Pierre.
1853 Melville's first daughter, Elizabeth, is born.
1855 Melville publishes Israel Potter. Frances, his second daughter and last child, is born.
1856 Melville publishes The Piazza Tales, a collection of short stories. At the point of mental and
physical collapse, he travels in Europe, Egypt, and the Holy Lands.
1857 Melville's The Confidence Man is published while he is out of the country. He launches a three-
year stint as a lecturer.
1863 Melville sells Arrowhead and returns to New York City.
1866 Melville publishes Battle Pieces, the first of his poetic works, and accepts a job as customs
inspector for the Port of New York. Malcolm dies of a self-inflicted pistol wound.
1869 Stanwix goes to sea.
1876 Melville publishes Clarel.
1886 Stanwix Melville dies of tuberculosis in San Francisco.
1888 Melville publishes John Marr and Other Sailors and begins writing Billy Budd on November 16.
1891 Melville publishes Timoleon, then completes the manuscript for Billy Budd on April 19 and dies
of a heart attack on September 28.
1924 Raymond Weaver is instrumental in the publication of Billy Budd.
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 6
BILLY BUDD
INTRODUCTION TO THE NOVEL
Critical Assessment
Like many artists, Melville felt constrained to choose between art and money. The turning point of his
career came in 1851. With the publication of Moby-Dick, he grew disenchanted with his attempt to please
the general reader. Instead, he cultivated a more spiritual language to express the darker, enigmatic side of
the soul. Like his letters, Melville's literary style became torturous and demanding; his themes questioned
the nature of good and evil and what he perceived as upheaval in universal order. Pierre, his first
published work after Moby-Dick, with its emphasis on incest and moral corruption, exemplifies his
decision to change direction. His readers, accustomed to the satisfying rough and tumble of his sea yarns,
were unable to make the leap from straightforward adventure tale to probing fiction. The gems hidden
among lengthy, digressive passages required more concentrated effort than readers were capable of or
willing to put forth.
Under the tutelage of Hawthorne, Melville developed the metaphysical elements of his work, often to the
detriment of clarity of diction and flow of language. For example:
On the starboard side of the Bellipotent's upper gun deck, behold Billy Budd under sentry lying
prone in irons in one of the bays formed by the regular spacing of the guns comprising the
batteries on either side. All these pieces were of the heavier caliber of that period. Mounted on
lumbering wooden carriages they were hampered with cumbersome harness of breeching and
strong side-tackles for running them out. Guns and carriages, together with the long rammers and
shorter lintstocks lodged in loops overhead--all these, as customary, were painted black; and the
heavy hempen breechings tarred to the same tint, wore the like livery of the undertakers. In
contrast with the funereal hue of these surroundings, the prone sailor's exterior apparel, white
jumper and white duck trousers, each more or less soiled, dimly glimmered in the obscure light of
the bay like a patch of discolored snow in early April lingering at some upland cave's black mouth.
In effect he is already in his shroud, or the garments that shall serve him in lieu of one.
Challenged to delve into the perplexities of human life, Melville avoided the more obvious superficialities
and plunged determinedly into greater mysteries. His output dwindled from novel length to short story.
One of the most obtuse of these, "Bartleby the Scrivener," published in Putnam's magazine in 1855,
focused on the dehumanization of a copyist; the nineteenth-century equivalent of a photocopy machine.
Suggesting the author's own obstinacy, the main character replies to all comers, "I would prefer not to,"
thereby declaring his independence from outside intervention.
Because the reading public refused his fiction, Melville began writing poems. The first collection, Battle
Pieces (1866), delineates Melville's view of war, particularly the American Civil War. With these poems,
he supported abolitionism, yet wished no vengeance on the South for the economic system it inherited.
The second work, Clarel (1876), an 18,000-line narrative poem, evolved from the author's travels in
Jerusalem and describes a young student's search for faith. A third, John Marr and Other Sailors (1888),
followed by Timoleon (1891), were privately published, primarily at the expense of his uncle, Peter
Gansevoort.
Virtually ignored by the literary world of his day, Melville made peace with the creative forces that
tormented him by writing his final work, Billy Budd, which records the ultimate confrontation between
evil and innocence. It took shape slowly from 1888 to 1891, for Melville had ceased scrabbling for a
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Cliffs Notes on Billy Budd & Typee © 1991 7
living and could afford the luxury of contemplative art. As he expressed to his friend and editor, Evert
Duyckinck, "I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go
down stairs five miles or more." Such a creature was Melville.
Sources
The creation of Billy Budd depended on the amalgamation of several sources.
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