Comparing Herman Melville's Benito Cereno and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin

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Recommended: Give criticism about Uncle Tom's cabin

Slavery is a topic much written about, especially in nineteenth

century literature. Many books and poems have been written in favor or

against it. Two stories written in the decade before the Civil War,

when the discussion about slavery was at its height, still stand out

today. Herman Melville's Benito Cereno (1855, 1856) and Harriet

Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) both criticize the

institution of slavery, but in a different way. Where Melville is

quite subtle, Beecher Stowe is much more obvious and sentimental.

In Benito Cereno Melville uses irony and the naivety of Captain Delano

as means to criticize slavery. He does this in a very subtle and

tricky way. The reader is misled through the whole story, but that is

only because of Captain Delano's description and misunderstanding of

the situation on the San Dominick. Captain Delano is incapable of

realizing what is really going on onboard. There are several passages

in the story where this comes plainly clear. Melville more or less

apologizes to the reader for this, by explaining the character of

Captain Delano in the fourth paragraph of the story, "a person of a

singularly undistrustful good nature, not liable, except on

extraordinary and repeated incentives, and hardly then, to indulge in

personal alarms, any way involving the imputation of malign evil in

man. Whether, in view of what humanity is capable, such a trait

implies, along with a benevolent heart, more than ordinary quickness

and accuracy of intellectual perception, may be left to the wise to

determine".[1] There are several scenes in the story where Captain

Delano's naivety becomes rather embarrassing afterwards. When reading

the story for the first time the reader does not know Cap...

... middle of paper ...

...e. By making a sentimental and not too difficult story she was

able to spread her criticism on slavery under a large audience. And

though Melville's story may be literary as good or even better than

Beecher Stowe's, history has proven the former more effective.

Works Cited

[1] Herman Melville, Benito Cereno. In: Nina Baym (ed.), The Norton

Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fifth edition (New York,

London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 1134, 1135.

[2] Herman Melville, Benito Cereno. In: Nina Baym (ed.), The Norton

Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fifth edition (New York,

London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), p.1166

[3] Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. In: Nina Baym (ed.), The

Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Fifth edition (New

York, London: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999), p. 803

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