SOURCE: “‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 39, No. 1, June, 1984, pp. 48-68.

In the following essay, Emery examines Melville's critique of American expansionism in “Benito Cereno.”

Like most authors of the first rank, Herman Melville has commonly been considered a devotee of the timeless, one who, especially in Moby-Dick (1851), sought ultimate answers to life's eternal questions. Only during the past two decades has Melville's “topicality” come to be recognized, as critics have underlined with increasing frequency his timely interest in racial prejudice and technological progress, in English slums and American naval abuses, in the Somers mutiny and the Civil War. Melville's “politics” have received particular attention. Alan Heimert was among the first to suggest that even Moby-Dick has its political side—its “symbolic” debt to the Compromise of 1850.¹ Lately, too, Michael Paul Rogin and James Duban have independently read the novel as an elaborate treatment of...