Benito Cereno Lesson Plan

Benito Cereno begins almost like a gothic horror story: full of dreamy atmosphere and poetic imagery. As the story moves along, it becomes less and less so, until it ends in a no-nonsense legal document. Why do you think Melville did this?

Melville is commenting upon Captain Delano’s (i.e. white society’s) attitudes towards slavery, which involved a lot of romanticizing (the “happy slave myth”). Captain Delano can’t see the truth about slavery because he’s living in a dream. In this dream, the slaves aren’t real people: they’re more like docile animals—the slave-woman is “like a doe in the shade of a woodland rock.” In the deposition, we finally see the “true state of...