"Apparent Symbol of Despotic Command": Melville's Benito Cereno

Abstract

W HEN Melville metamorphosed the eighteenth chapter of Amasa Delano's Narrative of Voyages and Travels into Benito Cereno, he made only one change in Delano's basic plot: he sent his Benito Cereno into monastic retirement, soon followed by death. Shortly after introducing Cereno, Melville hints of his fate: His manner upon such occasions was, in its degree, not unlike that which might be supposed to have been his imperial countryman's, Charles V., just previous to the anchoritish retirement of that monarch from the throne.' This hint leads to a source of more ultimate significance than Delano's Voyages-William Stirling's Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth. Benito Cereno appeared first in Putnam's Monthly Magazine in late 1855. In January of 1855, the Edinburgh Review had apologized for quoting from Stirling's Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles the Fifth: We are not sure whether we ought to quote from a book so well known as that of Mr. Stirling. (p. 83) There was some reason to apologize. Stirling's work had first appeared as two articles, entitled Cloister Life of the Emperor Charles V, in Fraser's Magazine of April and May, 1851. The next year the articles were expanded into a book, and by the year after, the book had run to three editions. The articles themselves were several times reprinted in other magazines, and numerous popular and recondite periodicals continually noticed, reviewed, summarized, and quoted from the book throughout 1853 and 1854. Many of the same periodicals were at the same time noticing, reviewing, summarizing, and quoting from Melville's