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O NE OF THE MOST DISTINCTIVE FEATURES of Herman Melville's White-jacket (I850) is its fervent democratic tone. In numerous rhetorical passages Melville's narrator, White-Jacket, passionately affirms inherent dignity and equality of common sailors, people, and castigates naval officers who lord it over people and subject them to indignity and injustice. The speeches condemning flogging are particularly impassioned, and Melville's works only Ishmael's prayer at end of first Knights and Squires chapter of Moby-Dick expresses Melville's ruthless democracy on all sides' with comparable explicitness and force. Understandably, democratic tone of White-Jacket has been emphasized by many critics. For example, Henry W. Wells, who views Melville as a great humanitarian seeking to ameliorate hardships of underprivileged and submerged classes, states that White-Jacket clearly of all we see champion of forecastle and friend of social reform.2 William Ellery Sedgwick stresses that the whole force and direction of [White-Jacket] is prompted by human heart's democracy, and he finds that in no other of [Melville's] books is there such a cordial glow of fellow feeling, and such a ripe humanity.' Similarly, Ray B. Browne declares that novel throbs with Melville's concern for world, society, and for humanity, and he identifies most important theme book as the conflict between officers on
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