SOURCE: “The Hanging Scene in Melville's Billy Budd: A Reply to Mr. Giovannini,” in Modern Language Notes, Vol. 70, No. 7, November, 1955, pp. 497–500.

In the following essay, Campbell responds to Giovannini's analysis, deeming his treatment of dualism as contradictory.

Mr. Giovannini says that I fail to see the “basic dualism” in Billy Budd and therefore I oversimplify the philosophical implications in the story. But Mr. Giovannini's treatment of this so-called “dualism” is so contradictory that I am afraid that I still fail to see it. At the end of his essay, apparently attempting to hedge in his argument, he explains this “dualism” as a kind of balance between opposites: “The issue,” he says, “is not simply between pessimism and optimism, unbelief and orthodox belief, but a complex at a point beyond them—perhaps at that point defined by Ishmael (Moby Dick, Ch. 85): ‘Doubts of all things earthly, and intuitions of...