Herman Melville
Short stories
Typee (1846), Omoo (1847)
 Moby Dick (1851)
 Pierre (1852)
 The Paradise of Bachelors, The Tartarus of
Maids and Bartleby the Scrivener were
published in Piazza Tales(1856)

Publication
This story offers an explicit expression of
Melville’s feelings concerning the linked
civilisations of Europe and America
 Paradise is set in London
 Tartarus is set in New England

Paradise … Tartarus
The biological interpretation:
E.H. Eby, “The Tartarus of Maids” Modern
Language Quarterly 1 (1940) 95-100.

“Melville’s intention is to represent through
the medium of the story the biological
burdens imposed on women because they
bear children.”
Tartarus of Maids

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The biological interpretation misses the irony
implicit in this story
“I could not but bethink me of that
celebrated comparison of John Locke, who,
in demonstration of this theory that man had
no innate ideas, compared the human mind
at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something
destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of
characters no soul might tell” (72).
John Locke’s theory of the mind as a tabula
rasa
But

Paradise: Heaven

Tartarus: a mythological hell that in Greek
mythology refers to the lowest part of the
underworld


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
Industrialism
Black and white as symbols are ambiguous
Paper mill is set in “ a snow-white hamlet
amidst the snow.”
The bachelors’ apartment was “wonderfully
unpretending, old and snug”
It is a thing which every sensible American
should learn from every sensible Englishman,
that glare and glitter…are not indispensable
to domestic solacement.” (58)
Tartarus of maids
But Melville is not saying that London is
better than New England
 Temple Bar is too sequestered, too far
from the action of the world. In the same
way as the paper mill is too remote from
the centre of civilised American life.
 Soft-flowing Thames contrasts with the
raging Blood River

Socrates and Cupid are symbolic of the
civilisations in which the seedsman finds
them
 Both civilisations—one an extension of the
other—are morally weak. The old world
suffers from inertia; the New World is
spiritually stunted.

Socrates and Cupid
4 interpretations
1. Literary artist who refuses to produce
the popular fiction demanded of him by
a commercial society
See Leo Marx’s essay “Melville’s Parable of
the Walls”, Sewanee Review 61 (1953)
602-27
Bartleby
2. Bartleby is Marx’s alienated worker
See Louise K Barnett’s “Bartleby as
alienated worker”
3. Bartleby is schizophrenic
See Morris Beja, “Bartleby and
Schizophrenia”
4. Bartleby is Christ
See Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods:
Melville’s Mythology
Emerson delivered his lecture “The
Transcendentalist” in 1848-49
 Melville heard it

Bartleby the Transcendentalist

what is popularly called
Trasncendentalism among us, is Idealism;
Idealism as it appears in 1842. As
Thinkers, mankind are divided into 2
sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first
class founding on experience, the second
on consciousness; Every materialist will
be an idealist; but an idealist can never
go backward to be a materialist.
“The Transcendentalist”

It is a sign of our times, conspicuous to the
coarsest observer, that many intelligent and
religious persons withdraw themselves from the
common labours and competitions of the market
and the caucus, and betake themselves to a
certain solitary and critical way of living, from
which no solid fruit has yet appeared to justify
their separation. They hold themselves aloof;
they feel the disproportion between their
faculties and the work offered them, and they
prefer to ramble in the country and perish of
ennui, to the degradation of such charities and
such ambitions as the city can propose to them.
“The Transcendentalist”

“If you do not need to hear my
thought…If you cannot divine it, you
would not understand what I say. I will
not molest myself for you. I do not wish
to be profaned”.
“The Transcendentalist”