English 267: Seminar in American Literature

Professor Doyle

23 March 2000

The various discourses of what is now known as "safer sex" have existed for as long as discourse on sexuality itself has been around. The putative dangers of certain sexual behaviors and identities have been decried, particularly by psychologists and medical doctors, beginning at least as early as the 18^th century. The discourse increased throughout the beginning of the 19^th century, until various medical tracts against masturbation and other sexual deviance exploded in the 1840s and 1850s. The proliferation of discourse on masturbation can be seen as a precursor to the proliferation of discourse on sexuality, and specifically homosexuality, at the end of the century. The discourse on masturbation coded it as being dangerous both to the health of the individual himself (as the masturbating subject was also a normatively male subject) and to the health and well being of society in general. Further, the mid-nineteenth century discourse on masturbation coded the medical threat as being both physiognomic and psychological in nature; it threatened both the physical body and the mind. Dangerous sexuality is associated with disease and with mental illness, as contagion and psychosis. Also, the masturbator has become a type, a "personage" in his own right, with physical, mental, and social characteristics that are detectable to an outside observer (Foucault 43). This formation serves as a precursor to the formation of the homosexual and the other sexual perverts later described by sexologists as the end of the 19^th century.

In this paper, I intend to place Melville's "Billy Budd, Sailor" within the discourses on masturbation ongoing in America at the time the short story would have been written, and to examine its relation to these discourses. Also, I intend to examine how current discourses of safer sex reflect 19^th century medical discourses about sex and sexuality: how it can be dangerous, what is considered healthy sexual behavior, and the assumptions that are made by the medical establishment about sexuality.

Masturbation was one of the sources of social anxiety both in Britain and the United States during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Alan Hunt traces out the history of antimasturbation campaigns during this period, focusing on the social purity movement in Great Britain but arguing that "the content of British and American texts is virtually indistinguishable; indeed, many of the texts were published on both sides of the Atlantic" (580). In fact, Sylvester Graham and Dr. John Harway Kellogg were publishing antimasturbation medical treatises in the United States as early as 1834, but they were by no means alone in the U.S. Hunt connects these moral and medical treatises to the social purity movement and to the early feminist movement in Britain as well as to anxieties of the growing empire. I intend to return to this second theme later in the paper, as it bears directly on the figure of Claggart and "Billy Budd, Sailor."

Foucault argues that there were four strategies that the Victorian period used to form its knowledge and power of sex. These were "a hysterization of women's bodies, "a pedagogization of children's sex", "a socialization of procreative behavior", and "psychiatrization of perverse pleasure" (104-105). These four technologies produce "the hysterical woman, the masturbating child, the Malthusian couple, and the perverse adult" (105). While the primary target of the social purity's campaign against onanism were adolescent boys, the medical and psychological texts are not as specific. The patient with masturbatory insanity is one figure produced by the psychomedical discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, another figure, the adult who introduces the child to masturbation, is produced in the Victorian antimasturbation discourses; presumably, he himself is a masturbator. The antimasturbation rhetoric included detailed what a person who had masturbated would be like, what his characteristics were, and what his future (insanity, death, or at the very least misery) was to be. In looking at the medicomoral literature against masturbation, there is certainly evidence that "this new persecution of the peripheral sexualities entailed an incorporation of perversions and a new specification of individuals" (Foucault 42-43).

In Herman Melville's novella "Billy Budd, Sailor", there are (at least) two masturbators: John Claggart and Billy Budd. Claggart is figured as evil masturbator and Billy Budd as the good one, for reasons that I intend to explore later in this paper. Claggart's physical description matches very closely with the physical description circulating about masturbators. Melville's physical description of Claggart is significant:

Also prevalent with this physical description is a psychological one. The masturbator is associated with education, or overeducation. Of course, one of the primary sites of anxieties over masturbation was the boarding school, which creates an association of education with masturbation. Priscilla Barker wrote that "self-abuse is related to a whole set of sinful corruptions, impurity of thought and imagination leading the way into bestial realms of impure literature, art and the whole science of sin" (7). Hunt notes that the nineteenth century discourse on masturbation indicated that glasses were one of the symptoms. Melville wrote "it served Claggart in his office that his eye could cast a tutoring glance. His brow was of the sort phrenologically associated with more than average intellect" (20). Sander Gilman notes that, to Heinrich von Kleist, "it is the reading of fiction which is the primary cause of masturbation, of which the central symptom is the loss of language" (Disease and Representation 73). This ties in with the notion that seclusion from the rest of the world is a symptom of masturbation: the scholar is often seen as locked away in an ivory tower, secluded away from everyone else.

Under Gilman's theory of the primary cause of masturbation, any readers of fiction find themselves being possible suspects. This implicates Captain "Starry" Vere, whose nickname comes from a kinsman's reading of Andrew Marvell's poem "Appleton House". Captain Vere

While the association of intellect with masturbation implicates both Captain "Starry" Vere and Claggart, the loss of language brings us to the figure of Billy Budd himself, a stutterer. At critical moments, Billy loses his ability to command language. When approached by the other sailor who asks if he could "help--at a pinch?", Billy cannot quite get the words out right. "D-d-damme, I don't know what you are d-d-driving at, or what you mean, but you had better g-g-go where you belong!" he responds (Melville 35). Of course, Billy's most crucial loss of speech comes when he's confronted about the conspiracy by Claggart in front of Captain Vere. Vere's command that Billy defend himself "caused but a strange dumb gesturing and gurgling in Billy; amazement at such an accusation so suddenly sprung on the inexperienced nonage; this, and, it may be, horror of the accuser's eyes, serving to bring out his lurking defect and in this instance for the time intensifying it into a convulsed tongue-tie" (Melville 49). Right before striking Claggart, Vere tries to comfort Billy, which has the contrary effect: "these words so fatherly in tone, doubtless touching Billy's heart to the quick, prompted yet more violent efforts at utterance--efforts soon ending for the time in confirming the paralysis, and bringing to his face an expression which was crucifixion to behold" (50). Billy cannot ejaculate the words he needs to save himself from the yardarm and noose, although he is still capable of ejaculating, with some trouble, the necessary words to ward off the conspirator.

The narrator, too, stammers and stutters in this novella, hinting at but never revealing certain key facts, such as what the nature of Claggart's "depravity" is, or whether there is, indeed, a mutiny brewing aboard the Bellipotent. When Billy is approached in the dark by the other sailor asking for help, he is cut off by Billy: "'See here,' and the man held up two small objects faintly twinkling in the night-light; 'see, the are yours, Billy, if you'll only---'" (Melville 35). Billy cuts him off, and we never find out either who he is or what he is asking for from Billy. Melville sets indeterminacy in motion throughout the novella, leaving the reader to determine the rest for her- or himself. Cesare Casarino writes about this phenomenon in another of Melville's stories, White-Jacket; or, The World in a Man-Of-War:

Claggart is described as being defined as a "'Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature,'" which has multiple meanings in the context of the novella. While some readers have taken Claggart's depravity to be homosexual desire, and by no means do I contest this, the nineteenth century reader would also understand this to be code for masturbation. Foucault notes that masturbation was "at the same time 'natural' and 'contrary to nature'" in children (104). This confusion of whether masturbation's status in relation to the "natural" is implied in Melville's description: Claggart could either be a depravity in accordance with nature, or a depravity against nature. Melville's phrase turns either way, just as Foucault notes the discourse on childhood masturbation does. Like homosexuality, masturbation was referred to euphemistically. It was alternately the "solitary vice", "self-abuse", the "solitary indulgence", and "the pampered passion", among other labels that talked around, but never directly of, masturbation (Hunt 586). Hunt notes that

That Billy masturbates is not in question in this text. His stuttering, a loss of language, is one symptom that reveals he masturbates, but the scene that raises Claggart's ire, the spilling of the soup in Claggart's path, is a symbolic ejaculation.

In describing homosexuality, homophobia, and the closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick articulates a theory about universalizing and minoritizing discourses about homosexuality that may serve to help read the difference between Claggart's masturbation and Billy's. That everyone harbors homosexual urges is the universalizing impulse in Western epistemologies of sexuality; that the homosexual is a specific type of person is the minoritizing impulse. Sedgwick reads Claggart as being the minoritized homosexual:

In his article on the nineteenth century masturbation panic in Great Britain, Alan Hunt downplays the connection between masturbation and homosexuality. While he recognizes that to the nineteenth century, boys learned to masturbate from (and with) other "bad boys" they were in boarding school with, he regards the panic as largely focused to discipline the heterosexual. He writes that "the fact that much schoolboy masturbation occurred in group situations suggests a possible link to a homosexual anxiety, but again it seems that the anxiety generated was that self-abuse would lead to the habit of dangerous indulgence in sensual pleasure with the consequent erosion of self-control and self-discipline" (606). Rather, he finds that "the 'solitary vice' was linked to the 'social vice' (prostitution) which was the central preoccupation of the social purity movement" (607). However, I find his argument unconvincing: the autoerotic, by its very nature, is also homoerotic (one cannot masturbate without pleasing a member of the same sex, even if that person is oneself). While it may be that the homosexual anxiety was incoherent and had not yet formed like it would in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it is still clearly present, even (or especially) in Hunt's interpretation of the medicomoral texts. Earlier in his article, he notes that boys never come to masturbation on their own, that they must learn it from someone else, often another schoolboy but sometimes anonymous men (often "a scoundrel whom he met in a railway train") (587). In an interesting rhetorical maneuver, Hunt de-emphasizes any link between homosexuality and masturbation:

At the end of the century, however, Richard von Krafft-Ebing would make the connection between masturbation, homosexuality, and sailors quite explicit:

With Krafft-Ebing and Freud, we have the mention of masturbators (and homosexuals) other than the boarding-school boys and other adolescents. Krafft-Ebing and Freud are examining the sexual behavior of many persons who are in enclosed spaces: prisons, aboard ships, in armies, and in boarding schools. Of course, these are places that have been long hinted at being sites of homosexuality and mutual masturbation. Freud, for example, brings up "comradeship in war" and "detention in prison" as being external influences that cause inversion (which he characterizes as aiming at mutual masturbation) (6). While Krafft-Ebing pays lip service to this being a problem with both sexes, male and female, the dangerous spaces he enumerates are specifically male spaces. Here I find myself in agreement with Hunt: while the social purity movement was often informed by an antisex feminist movement, it was equally informed by imperial anxieties. The virtue of manliness is required to keep an effective military force to defend national borders, and masturbation was equated with expending one's virility. In short, the masturbator made himself less a man. Hunt writes "the imperial project became focused on a concern with weakness and unmanliness. A Galahad complex linked moral and military strength and constructed males as soldiers as the standard by which to measure national strength" (609). It must not be forgotten that John Claggart was master-at-arms and Billy Budd was sailor aboard the H.M.S. Bellipotent, a ship of war on its way to meet the fleet in the Mediterranean Sea. Hunt notes that "the key feature was that these discourses readily shifted back and forth between anxieties about personal weakness and national weakness, where projects centered on self-control were perceived as solutions" (610). The link between good self-governance and good national-governance is one being made in these discourses, and should inform the reading of "Billy Budd, Sailor." John Claggart is described as having "monomania…involuntarily disclosed by starts in the manifestations detailed, yet in general covered over by his self-contained and rational demeanor; this, like a subterranean fire, was eating its way deeper and deeper in him. Something decisive must come of it" (42). Similarly brewing "like a subterranean fire" is the threat of mutiny aboard the Bellipotent, which leads to the deaths of both Claggart and Budd. Sedgwick points out that "the attempted entrapment of Billy by the after-guardsman (one of the 'implicit tools' of the master-at-arms) only accentuates the mirroring structure of this form of enforcement, as well as the ineradicable double entendre in this book between the mutiny question and the homosexuality question" (103). I submit that there's a third potential question, inextricably tied to "the homosexuality question": the masturbation question. Lack of self-control begets the failure to control the empire. Monomania and mutiny are linked not only in Melville's story, but also in the antimasturbation discourses themselves. In this novella, anxieties over failure to control the self, failure to control the empire, and homosexuality are bound up together.

Further complicating this foreign threat is the figure of Claggart himself. Not only is he figured physically as the masturbator, but the narrator speculates about his foreign origins. Melville writes

Nineteenth century attitudes about masturbation regarded it as evil, potentially leading to insanity or death at worst, unmanliness, weakness, prostitution, homosexuality, disease, and all sorts of other social and solitary vices at best. The technologies of a discourse of safer sex begin in this period, and masturbation was figured as being an extremely dangerous form of sexual behavior. In an ironic twist, masturbation, under the pressure of AIDS, has come to be regarded as being one of the safest forms of sexual behavior available. Solitary masturbation is no longer regarded as being dangerous to one's physical and mental health, and mutual masturbation, in the current discourses of safer sex, is considered a negligible risk. The figure of the pathological solitary masturbator may be resurfacing with the growth of the Internet and Internet pornography, but this remains to be seen. While many of these valences would continue on up through the twentieth century, although much subdued or even repressed outright, the structure of the discourse of safer sex itself has remained stable.