"Peering Across the Plaza": The Shrouded Women of "Benito Cereno"

Abstract

When the ship that is the site of the ongoing slave revolt is first spotted in Herman Melville's Benito Cereno, the vessel is immediately racialized and feminized. Referencing a style of dress popular among women in the Viceroyalty of Peru during the colonial period, the ship, writes Melville, show[s] not unlike a Lima intriguante's one sinister eye peering across the Plaza from the Indian loop-hole of her dusk saya-y-manta . The saya y manto, or the tapada limena, is literally a covering—a skirt and veil used to disguise the wearer's identity. It is an essential emblem of the impossibility of recognition and a signifier of freedoms marshalled under constraint. This essay considers the saya y manto as a necessary codex to Benito Cereno. When we trace the confounding circulations of the tapada limena in the historical record, the women of this story—both the enslaved women on board the ship and those conjured by allusion to the tapada—emerge as more than just an allegorical foil to shipboard masculinity. Instead, the women characters carry out Melville's challenge to colonial knowledge projects, easy identifications amidst the zeitgeist of Victorian classificatory sciences, and attempts at definitive racialization.