Justice and Alternative Sexuality in Herman Melville‘s Billy Budd

Abstract

This thesis explores the intersection between alternative sexuality and the negation of justice in Herman Melville's Billy Budd. The thesis ponders on why Billy, an innocent character, is idealized and immortalized after being executed for killing Claggart, a sexually and morally repressed officer. This study argues that Billy Budd demonstrates how legal and institutional systems employ justice as a tool to discipline what is other, even at the expense of morality and fairness. Billy's otherness—particularly within the arena of sexuality as perceived by both Claggart and Captain Vere—must be eliminated prior to being assimilated or accepted. Based on theoretical insights from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Michel Foucault, the analysis of the text demonstrates that Billy's innocence, perceived femininity, and silence—markers of queerness— destabilizing the naval regime, and the regime responds with violence legitimized as justice. The study demonstrates that in Melville's novella, justice is performative and exclusionary, and thus it is designed to consolidate heteronormative power by suppressing difference. Keywords: Alternative Sexuality, Justice, Gender, Body, Performativity, Queer