On Captain Vere and the Electric Chair: Capital Punishment, Billy Budd, and Fantasies of Sovereign Power in the Late 19th Century

While Herman Melville was writing Billy Bud, Sailor, political elites in his home state of New York were overhauling their state’s death penalty. Their work culminated in the Electrical Execution Act of 1888. In addition to changing the state’s execution method from hanging to electrocution, the legislation introduced new policies and execution procedures aimed at projecting an image of law as majestic and inexorable in its operation. By bringing new discipline and secrecy to executions, reformers hoped that they could exert greater control over the public’s response to them. Through a close reading of Billy Budd and archival documents related to the adoption of the electric chair, I argue that the novella grapples with a fantasy of sovereign power similar to the one that drove execution reform efforts in New York. Efforts to achieve total control over life and death, Melville suggests, are bound to fail because they require a depersonalization of both the agent and the subject of sovereign power that is unjust and, mercifully, unfeasible. Neither Billy’s death by hanging nor the first execution by electricity in New York had the effects on the public’s responses to executions that elites desired. Ironically, though, the failure of efforts to control the meaning of executions may have made capital punishment more palatable to the public than it otherwise would have been.