Schoeck_2010_EnvyATheoryOfSocialBehaviour.pdf

THE BLIND SPOT IN MELVILLE SCHOLARS 171
Claggart's character Melville is investigating the problem of envy. Stone
quotes long passages from the novel on the subject of the master-at-arms'
motivation, but avoids all those in which Melville uses the term 'envy.'
Stone even goes into what he declares to be the modern interpretation of
Claggart, according to which he is a homosexual, no less, whose unrequited
love for the beautiful sailor turns into ambivalent love-hate and
eventually into mortal hatred. This interpretation Stone rejects: 'Melville
constantly addresses himself to the metaphysical implications of
Claggart's depravity, and if these are not his chief concern with the
matter, we are left with the curious spectacle of a highly intelligent old
man devoting the last three years of his life to pondering a simple case of
thwarted pederasty. ,18 Here Stone is right, but there is not a single word
to suggest that Melville devoted three years of his life to the anatomy of
envy. The few authors, however, who have gone into the matter, demonstrate
how obvious the chief subject of Melville's concern really is.
Milton R. Stern, for instance, devotes seven pages to a detailed
interpretation of Claggart, mentioning the envious element several
times. 19 R O. Matthiessen puts it most clearly, perhaps, in his work on
American literature: '. . . Claggart . . . whose malignity seems to be
stirred most by the envious sight of virtue in others, as Iago's was.' And
elsewhere:
To characterize what Claggart feels, Melville has recourse to the quotation,
'Pale ire, envy and despair,' the forces that were working in Milton's
Satan as he first approached the Garden of Eden. Melville has also jotted
down, on the back of his manuscript, some remembered details about
Spenser's 'Envy': and in his depiction of Clagg art's inextricable mixturelonging
and malice-he would seem to be reverting likewise to the properties
he had noted in Shakespeare's conception of this deadly sin. 20
18 Op. cit., p. 313.
19 M. R. Stern, The Fine Hammered Steel of Herman Melville, Urbana, 1957, pp. 227
ff. Claggart's envy is also mentioned twice by J. B. Noone, Jr., 'Billy Budd, Two
Concepts of Nature, , American Literature, Vol. 29, 1957, p. 251. And by W. Berthoff,
The Example of Melville, Princeton, 1962: 'Claggart ... is envious and despairing'
(p.200).
20 American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman,
London, 1941,pp.435,505.