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

The article examines the parallels between Herman Melville’s novella *Billy Budd, Sailor* and the 1888 Electrical Execution Act in New York, which replaced hanging with electrocution as the state’s method of capital punishment. Both Melville’s narrative and the legislation reflect a 19th-century elite desire to project sovereign power through depersonalized, swift executions that suppress sympathy for the condemned and emphasize the majesty and inevitability of law. However, the article argues that these efforts to control the meaning and emotional impact of executions ultimately failed, as public and cultural responses continued to humanize the condemned and question the justice of state killing. The legacy of this failure is seen in ongoing portrayals of condemned individuals as complex moral beings and in the persistence of execution rituals that address psychological and moral needs, which paradoxically have made capital punishment more socially palatable.