Madness and mastery in Melville's "Benito Cereno." - Herman Melville

Criticism, Wntr, 1996 by Benjamin D. Reiss

The enthusiasm of these liberal correctors of liberalism led to an unfortunate overestimation of their powers, verging on the megalomaniacal: a belief that no silence brought about by liberal society's excesses was beyond retrieval by civilized institutions. Ruth Caplan writes of the widespread "curability myth" circulating in the first few decades of the existence of American asylums, in which superintendents regularly claimed success rates upward of eighty and ninety per cent for their patients.(21) These rosy figures helped bolster support for the building of more public asylums, and state expenditures for the construction, maintenance, and improvement of asylums rose dramatically through the 1840s. As the superintendents propagated this rather self-serving myth of curability, they also painted a benevolent view of the insane as childlike and innocent; as Pliny Earle put it: "The motives, the influences, and, as a general rule, the means necessary for the good government of children, are equally applicable, and equally efficient for the insane."(22) Delano reflects this sentiment in his wishful hypothesis of Benito Cereno's "innocent lunacy."

But faith in the "good government" of the mentally ill soon began to wane, for the insane, it turned out, were not always curable. During the 1850s, superintendents came to recognize the chronic and even dangerous nature of much mental illness (a recognition that perhaps resonated with Melville's experience of his own father's apparent descent into madness(23)). Asylums were becoming overcrowded, and themselves began to represent a social problem. Wealthy families took to placing their afflicted relatives in private institutions, as the public ones were filled with paupers and immigrants who could not adjust to the expectations of their new country. The Worcester State Hospital in Massachusetts even created "separate but equal" facilities for the native-born and foreigners in 1859.(24) Furthermore, the very nature of insanity seemed more threatening than before. Isaac Ray and Pliny Earle each wrote sober accounts of the intractability of much mental illness; and as opposed to the earlier views of insanity as a malady that required sympathy and benevolent application of discipline for a cure, the professional and popular press were full of tales of the extraordinary dangers posed by too much contact with the insane, particularly in asylums. In 1857, for example, a report in the American Journal of Insanity told of a doctor who had allowed an apparently harmless old patient to play with his children, only to have the patient tell him later that "three or four times I have had a strong inclination to kill" one of them.(25)

A reverse fear also began to surface. Not only could the insane present a threat to the security and property of others, but the psychiatric "experts," with their new legal powers, could conspire against the property of those they labelled insane. The Atlantic Monthly published a sensational account of a sane man driven mad by his wrongful incarceration in an asylum. The writer of the article, L. Clarke Davis, claimed that the man's estranged wife had conspired with a doctor to have him committed to an asylum in Pennsylvania, with the motive of gaining control of his assets. In Davis' portrait, the asylum was at once a Gothic space of unfreedom, presided over by corrupt and vicious superintendents, and a rat's nest of sexual license. "Female patients, who, from the carelessness of those having charge of them, have had improper intercourse with men," were turning asylums, literally, into "breeding-houses of insane offspring." Cast into such an environment by "conspirators against our own estate or happiness" who are aided by a power-seeking medical establishment that regularly administers tortures and confinements that would "drive a sane man mad," Davis offered a call to vigilance for readers; for asylums are "torture-houses, breeders of insanity, for those who may, by cruel chance, be brought under their peculiar influence."(26)