Men and Coats; or, The Politics of the Dandiacal Body in Melville's “Benito Cereno”

Abstract

At the conclusion of “Benito Cereno” Herman Melville “elucidate[s]” a curious “item or two,” including Cereno's ultragentlemanly apparel. This return to the issue of Cereno's clothes reiterates the Yankee Delano's preoccupation with Cereno as a dandy, restaging Delano's tendency to focus unswervingly on the apparently complex markers of class superiority signaled by such genteel refinement—and, within the logic of that preoccupation, to ignore the seemingly transparent truth presented by the naked black body. Melville mobilizes the figure of the dandy. I suggest, to interrogate the Yankee's veneration of social form, a veneration at odds with the North's smug self-figuration in 1855 as homogeneously democratic and classless, as morally superior to a South reviled for its social inequalities and slaveholding. By orchestrating the encounter between Yankee and dandy, Melville maps a peculiarly northern political field, pointing to an obfuscatory rhetoric of “apparent symbol[s]” that articulates the slave only polemically and ignores him otherwise.