ABSTRACT
The author examines how the representations and complications of one late nineteenth-century text - Herman Melville's "Billy Budd, Sailor" - are illuminated by a reading that takes into account this essentializing and interweaving of both national and racial identity at century's end. Yet "Billy Budd" is not simply about "Anglo-Saxonism". Mizruchi suggested that the opening description of a black "handsome sailor" necessitated Melville's initial decision to signal Billy's "whiteness", a necessity that provides further proof of the importance of "race" to this national allegory. Leaving aside Melville's motivations for the moment, this erasing of the descriptive "white" could be viewed as a gesture paralleled by the erasing of "race" as a central problematic of the text throughout its extensive critical history. Where such erasures have occurred, Billy's "whiteness" comes to serve, authors believe, as what Morrison deems the "unspeakable thing unspoken", as, like the whiteness of Ahab's whale, "the ghost in the machine".
