Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE RELUCTANCE TO ATTRIBUTE ENVY 167
This shows remarkable insight in Melville. There has remained in
criminological literature and practice up to the present a noticeable
aversion towards express reference to the envy-motive, although there is
convincing evidence in other sources of its significance in crime.
Not till now, forty pages after the beginning of the story, does Melville
introduce the concept of envy, in a section headed 'Pale ire, envy, and
despair,' the words Milton uses to characterize Satan. From this point,
envy recurs again and again as the motive behind the master-at-arms'
persecution of Billy Budd. Claggart is himself handsome, but his frequent
ironic remarks about the sailor's beauty are explained by the
author as envy:
Now envy and antipathy, passions irreconcilable in reason, nevertheless
in fact may spring conjoined like Chang and Eng in one birth. Is envy then
such a monster? Well, though many an arraigned mortal has in hopes of
mitigated penalty pleaded guilty to horrible actions, did ever anybody
seriously confess to envy? Something there is in it universally felt to be
more shameful than even felonious crime. And not only does everybody
disown it but the better sort are inclined to incredulity when it is in earnest
imputed to an intelligent man. But since its lodgement is in the heart not the
brain, no degree of intellect supplies a guarantee against it. 10
The passion of envy is kept secret by all men, regardless of their
culture and language, more fearfully and shamefully than any form of
erotic passion or perversion. To become a topic for literature and polite
conversation, the latter needed a Sigmund Freud and his school. And it is
no coincidence that Melville wrote this novel, in which envy is depicted
in all its dangerous ugliness, at the end of his very long life fraught with
privation and disappointment; for he must completely have resigned
himself to his personal fate and to his lack of success in his own time.
In Claggart it was no vulgar envy that the author depicted, not just
morbid jealousy which 'marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on
the comely young David.' 'Claggart's envy struck deeper.' He sensed
that Billy's outward beauty was related to a nature innocent of evil and
envy. It was this strange moral phenomenon that drove Claggart to
extremes of envy.
Melville even recognizes the paranoid aspect of such envy; because
10 op. cit. , p. 677.