Just wanted to follow up on Sofia’s interesting questions about the use of “mantrap” in Melville’s text. So of course I had to consult the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), every professor and poet’s favorite toy.

A “mantrap” is just what it sounds like, literally speaking: a trap to catch humans. I would love to research the history of such traps, which is surely bound up in histories of enslavement and exploitation. More to the point, it appears that “mantrap” referred to a conniving woman, especially one who wants to trick a man into marriage. Here we get a clearer sense of how Claggart’s fascination with Budd might have some erotic overtones in ways that critics like Eve Sedgwick and others have explored.

Finally, for those interested in how reading-as-play a la Roland Barthes might actually look, you can see my experiment with Hunter students transforming Billy Budd into a role-playing-game like Dungeons and Dragons. It’s a bit hard to “read” as opposed to “playing” it, but that’s part of the point. At any rate, feel free to poke around: basically every player plays a role in (Budd, Claggart) or around (Melville himself, an editor of one of text’s editions, a composer turning it into an opera, a critics interpreting it) the text. Players “move” and interact by writing short texts “in character.”