Herman MelvilleShort stories

Publication

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)

Paradise … Tartarus

This story offers an explicit expression of Melville’s feelings concerning the linked civilisations of Europe and America

Paradise is set in LondonTartarus is set in New England

Tartarus of Maids

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.”

But

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

Paradise: Heaven

Tartarus: a mythological hell that in Greek mythology refers to the lowest part of the underworld

Tartarus of maids

Industrialism Black and white as symbols are ambiguousPaper 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)

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

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.

Bartleby

4 interpretations1. 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

2. Bartleby is Marx’s alienated worker

See Louise K Barnett’s “Bartleby as alienated worker”

3. Bartleby is schizophrenicSee Morris Beja, “Bartleby and

Schizophrenia”

4. Bartleby is Christ

See Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology

Bartleby the Transcendentalist

Emerson delivered his lecture “The Transcendentalist” in 1848-49

Melville heard it

“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”.