Fatal underestimation—Sue's Atar-Gull and Melville's "Benito Cereno" - Articles - Herman Melville's 'Benito Cereno' - Eugene Sue's 'Atar-Gull'

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1998 by John D. Cloy

   "You are saved, Don Benito," cried Captain Delano, more and more astonished
   and pained; "you are saved; what has cast a shadow upon you?"

      "The negro." ("Benito Cereno" 104)

The casual reader might be initially tempted to associate the dark skin of the Africans Babo and Atar-Gull with evil, the lighter hue of Benito Cereno and Tom Wil with virtue. However, both Sue and Melville employ the black characters as justified revenge figures, although not totally positive characters. Their enslavement by whites permits the extremity of the slaves' actions, though the barbarity of their retaliation revolts modern readers. The writers sought to demonstrate a more "civilized" barbarity on the part of whites in the practice of chattel bondage. Melville's travels as a merchant seaman (and presumably Sue's as a naval physician) gave him a tolerant attitude toward people of all races. The New York writer professed sympathy with "people of all shades of color, and all degrees of intellect, rank, and social worth." (11) Sue's republicanism has been described by detractors as opportunistic, embraced at a later period of his life after failing in an attempt at acceptance by the aristocracy. While the truth of this charge is doubtless impossible to prove after so long a period, Sue's implied sympathy with Atar-Gull and lack of empathy with Wil and his family in the novel speak volumes. Throughout the narrative the reader gets the sense that the slave is not only condoned in his vengeance by the author, but also tacitly approved.

Gothic elements are present in these sea narratives. (12) Melville's story contains structures that exude gothic characteristics--the San Dominick is called a "white-washed monastery" in the narrative, and the official buildings in Lima where the rebels are tried resemble castles. The shadowy atmosphere of unreality that pervades the work supports a gothic theme; even the thick-witted Captain Delano senses that strange forces are at work. Sue's novel also features a slave vessel with many compartments, analogous to a medieval fortress. The many-storied dwelling where Atar-Gull and Wil come to live in Paris is a classic gothic house, with a concierge and numerous neighbors of various social complexions. The hint of magic involved in Atar-Gull's associations with the Maroons in the West Indies gives an added element of the macabre to this bizarre tale of ferocious revenge. Both works are shaded with religious overtones. Melville calls the slaves "black friars," and the entrance of Cereno into a monastery at the book's end is no accident. Sue's choice of a Catholic country (France) to end his story is not coincidental. The pious neighbors and associates of the odd Englishman and his black servant confer honors on the fiendish hypocrite after Wil's demise. This implied criticism of Roman blindness to reality and preoccupation with externals parallels Sue's more overt condemnation of Catholicism in The Wandering Jew, a scathing denunciation of the Society of Jesus. One also gets the impression that Sue does not judge too harshly the African religion that the slaves continue to embrace covertly, since the whites' faith does little to console their misery and isolation. Indeed, European Christianity viewed blacks as benighted inferiors, leaving the slaves little opportunity for an acceptable existence within the rigid hierarchical confines of the eighteenth-century great chain of being.