132 The Pursuit of Personal Freedom from Normative Labeling (Group Anthology Con
132 The Pursuit of Personal Freedom from Normative Labeling (Group Anthology Contribution 2019)
John Galusha; Rose Paulin; and Benjamin Ruhl
Every text, no matter what it appears to be about or what message it’s trying to convey, deserves a reading that is new and fresh. No one taking this course has done a reading like this one. Most are too concerned about linking the text to transnational literature to see much else, but that’s where we come in, with a twist on typical readings of Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. Aside from being, yes, transnational literature, Benito Cereno also disparages neurodivergant, nonheteronormative, non-white people, suppressing their innate human desire for the personal freedom to pursue happiness. Why the phrase “personal freedom to pursue happiness”? It’s possibly one of the most American sentiments expressible in words alone, being part of the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. Once you suppress this desire, or the ability to pursue it, for anyone, their citizenship as an American is, at its essence, stripped away. By making the statement that certain people are undeserving of citizenship in America within Early American Literature, which helped to form the identity of the nation, it shows how this bigotry truly permeated American existence from the birth of the nation.
This disparagement for difference can be seen throughout the text, mainly in subtle ways, and greatly concerning the African characters. The disparagement marginalizes all people of color, and specifically shows how Delano views people; this is often shown in his comparisons of the Africans on board the San Dominick to animals.
“His attention had been drawn to a slumbering Negress, partly disclosed through the lace-work of some rigging, lying, with youthful limbs carelessly disposed, under the lee of the bulwarks, like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock. Sprawling at her lapped breasts was her wide-awake fawn, stark naked, its black little body half lifted from the deck, crosswise with its dam’s; its hands, like two paws, clambering upon her; its mouth and nose ineffectually rooting to get at the mark; and meantime giving a vexatious half-grunt, blending with the composed snore of the Negress. The uncommon vigour of the child at length roused the mother. She started up, at distance facing Captain Delano. But, as if not at all concerned at the atti-tude in which she had been caught, delightedly she caught the child up, with maternal transports, covering it with kisses. There’s naked nature, now; pure tenderness and love, thought Captain Delano, well pleased” (29-30).
This passage clearly describes an African woman and her child as a pair of deer, Delano’s tone being that of a bird-watcher observing some rare interaction between natural forces. As he observes what he calls a “doe in the shade of a woodland rock” and her “wide-awake fawn,” he compares their interactions to a force of natural love, that which a domesticated mammal mother