멜빌의『버니토 서리노』: 평범한 북부인의 자선 혹은 해적질

Abstract

This essay is an attempt to read Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno as presenting a distorted vision of charity. The surface of the narrative seems to portray the heroic and charitable actions of Amasa Delano, an ordinary Northern American: he offered charity to the San Dominick, a ship in distress; and, on behalf of Benito Cereno, his suffering neighbor, he put down a violent slave revolt led by Babo. In addition, he mentions that he was too good-hearted to suspect Babo’s sinister conspiracy. Delano’s charity, however, neither helped nor saved anybody: the Spanish captain finally perished, utterly wasted in body and spirit; and the slave rebels were either reenslaved or put to death. Such uncharitable consequences lead readers to see through this American’s charity: its ulterior motive was a piratical seizure of the Spanish ship and its valuable cargo, particularly the slaves. Indeed, for this Yankee, “charity” and “piracy” were interchangeable. While he benevolently professed to take care of the Spanish ship for the distressed Captain Cereno, this in fact symbolized America’s takeover of the collapsing Spanish Empire in the New World. Moreover, the Northerner’s friendly benevolence toward the blacks signified his tacit desire to exploit their labor and sex, which in turn shows his endorsement of the extension of Southern slavery to Central America. More importantly, the Northerner’s rhetoric of charity systematically justified his use of violence. According to Delano’s charitable mind, American charity signified American supremacy: Americans were so superior to Spaniards and blacks in national and racial terms that the United States was naturally in a position to condescend to help these inferiors through its generous annexation of the decaying Spanish Empire and its extension of the benevolent system of slavery, respectively. In order to achieve such charitable or piratical goals, on the one hand, the Yankee violently repressed, subdued, and banished uneasy signs such as the concealed African revolt and Babo’s powerful intellect in and from his consciousness and psychology. On the other hand, the Northerner’s exercise of American charity indeed suppressed the slave revolt and seized the Spanish vessel and its cargoes by force, thereby achieving American expansion and its extension of slavery. However, Babo, the ringleader of the slave revolt aboard the San Dominick, orchestrated his racial masquerade to expose and mock Delano’s charity as hazardous piracy. “Follow your leaders,” his message, made a point indeed: any civilization that prospered from human enslavement and exploitation would necessarily collapse. That was the main cause of the Spanish Empire’s decline in the New World, and if America followed suit, it, too, would follow its “leader,” Spain. The United States indeed followed its “leader” because this ordinary Northerner’s charitable mind, having been so habitually and deliberately repressed for piratical purposes, led him to ignore the warning signs that emanated from the slave revolutions in the New World. Delano’s charitable or piratical smile consequently laid the path to the Civil War: the antebellum rhetoric of charity thus germinated the violent upheaval of the nation.