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Abstract
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Herman Melville's novella Billy Budd, Sailor (1924 posthumous publication) chronicles the life of Billy Budd, a young, innocent sailor impressed into British naval service during the Napoleonic Wars. Billy's inherent goodness clashes with the malevolent Master-at-Arms John Claggart, culminating in Billy's accidental killing of Claggart and subsequent execution under Captain Vere's martial law. This proposal investigates the roots of Billy's trauma through psychoanalysis, which uncovers unconscious repressions; disability studies, which examines his stutter as a socially constructed impairment; and deconstruction, which reveals instabilities in binary oppositions like innocence/evil and law/justice. The significance of the research subject lies in combining psychoanalysis, disability studies, and deconstruction to examine Billy Budd’s trauma and go beyond conventional moral or legal analyses. This study fills in scholarly gaps in Melville criticism. It highlights how 19th-century naval practices mirror contemporary systemic oppressions, shedding light on historical institutional traumas pertinent to current issues like military PTSD and disability rights amid the growing literary focus on mental health. The objectives of this research are to uncover the psychoanalytic dimensions of repression in Billy’s trauma, with attention to unconscious conflicts emerging from impressment, and to examine disability frameworks that illuminate the social impact of his stutter and the exclusionary norms it exposes.
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