The Revolt of the "Blind Slave": White Oversight in "The Bell-Tower"

Abstract: This essay reads Melville's "The Bell-Tower" in light of James Madison's theorization of enslaved people's legal status as a "mixed character of persons and property." Melville leaves the bell-ringer's ontological status ambiguous to underscore the absurdity of this legal notion of enslaved persons' "double character." "The Bell-Tower" troubles "mixed character" discourse by undercutting the explanatory narrative that stabilizes the bell-ringer's ontological ambiguity. Moreover, Melville couples the legal fiction of enslaved personhood with the power relations of racialized surveillance, indicating how the law and visuality work in tandem to uphold slavery's system of domination. Attending to the competing versions of surveillance and vision in the story reveals Bannadonna's "white oversight" in providing the racialized bell-ringer access to an elevated panoptical perspective that is normally the domain of whiteness. Whereas the logic of slavery insists that these racialized positions of visual power are fixed, "The Bell-Tower" destabilizes them, demonstrating that the racialized figure's access to an elevated perspective facilitates violent resistance.