Melville's "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids": a dialogue about experience, understanding, and truth - Herman Melville

Studies in Short Fiction, Summer, 1994 by Karen A. Weyler

Herman Melville's shorter prose works pose many of the same problems for readers as do his longer works, for he engages in similar experiments with genre and narration. One particular problem in Melville's shorter works is distinguishing the genre in which he is working, since genre obviously affects how we read and process a text. Although these works are often called "short stories," many do not neatly fit this category but instead fall somewhere in between short story and sketch. Frequently the symbolic, moral, or allegorical content of Melville's shorter works would seem to disqualify them as sketches, while their lack of plot would fail to qualify, them as short stories. This indeterminacy has long troubled Melville scholars. Richard Fogle, in fact, argues that Melville "is too heavy for the delicate fabric of the kind of tale he is trying to write; what he really has to say is at odds with the limits he has chosen to observe" (12) Certainly Melville's symbolism and allegory are at times heavy-handed. But his experiments and innovations with genre and narration in some of his shorter prose works merit further attention. Blending together the genres of the sketch and the short story, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is one of these works.

For a number of reasons, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is a difficult work to interpret. The problem of genre is compounded by the fact that the work is divided into two sections, the first focusing on the bachelors of the Temple-Bar in London, and the second focusing on the factory girls at a New England paper mill. The blending of sketch and tale is clearly related to the two-part structure of the work, for the sketch-oriented structure of the first half gives way to a more tale or story-oriented second half. More important, the form of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is an organic outgrowth of its content; the changes in the genre and form of the work parallel the changes the, narrator himself experiences, and the narrator is thus the key to understanding this puzzling work. As a whole, this story dramatizes his movement from passivity and observation to direct engagement with life. Individually, the two sections of the story are limited in scope; together, they represent not mere contrasts, but a dialogue about the relationship between experience, truth and understanding. The two-part structure and shifting genres of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" prove to be not inherent flaws in the work but remarkably effective ways for Melville to reach beyond language to communicate his anxiety about the limitations of language.

By joining the sketch to the short story, Melville attempted to appeal to the popular interest in both of these genres - an important concern for a nearly bankrupt author. Because of its two-part, seemingly disjointed narrative, the apparent absence of Poe's "unity of effect," and the plotless first section, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" would seem to violate the expectations for the short story. Yet the category of "sketch" does not offer a satisfactory alternative definition for this work either. The nineteenth-century literary sketch is descriptive, impressionistic, and often expository in nature, generally lacking an overt moral or allegorical message. Although the sketch may contain a narrative story within its general framework, the sketch itself usually lacks a discernible plot. With these characteristics in mind, Valerie Shaw has usefully defined the sketch as having the "static quality of a still-life painting" (20). If the sketch itself begins to have a plot, then it moves closer to the category of short story. This is precisely the case with "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and the narrator himself is the key to understanding this transformation.

The use of a first person narrator, like the blending of genres, is a hallmark of Melville's work. Furthermore, his narrators frequently adopt a retrospective stance because the telling and retelling is necessary to their understanding of their own experience. Ishmael in Moby-Dick is the best example of this retrospective narrator, although other works like White-Jacket also rely on a retrospective narrator. Through telling - in effect reconstructing and confronting the experiences they have had - Melville's first person narrators seek to arrive at some sort of truth so that their experiences are not meaningless.

The experiences the narrator confronts in "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" include exposure to two very different groups of people: bachelors of the Temple-Bar of London and the mill girls of New England. By itself, each section of this story is extremely limited in scope. But the union of these two creates a textured richness that is greater than mere contrast. The sketch-like quality of Melville's narrative in the "Paradise" part of the work appropriately symbolizes and corresponds to the static quality, of the lives of the bachelors. The unnamed narrator is self-effacing and chameleon-like, reflecting the state of those around him; he is static, and only through irony does he reveal himself.(1) In the "Tartarus" section, the same narrator goes in search of "adventure," of direct engagement with life. This section of the work dramatizes the narrator's movement from a passive existence, marked by observation and his vicarious enjoyment of others, experiences, into an active life of his own. At the same time, the narrator,s engagement with the events that he is describing alters the form and structure of the work, warping the second part from a sketch into a talc of heavy allegorical content. The narrator's reconstruction of these two events allows him to understand them, and this knowledge supplies the latent irony for the "Paradise" section.