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

The bachelors, "Paradise" sketch opens with images of their enclosure and isolation from the rest of the London. Obviously in the Irvingesque tradition of the literary "sketch," approximately the first third of this section involves a description of the Temple. In retrospect, the narrator recalls the Temple as a retreat, an "oasis" where a man can "disentangle" himself from the "care-worn world" (316). The Temple itself can be compared to one of Melville's ships, for it is a microcosm of the world, a "city by itself" The narrator alternately describes the Temple as a honeycomb and a cheese, both comparisons serving to emphasize the luxurious, gluttonous nature of life in the Temple. Additional descriptions enhance these images of enclosure. "Like any cheese," the, Temple "is quite perforated through and through in all directions with the snug cells of bachelors" (319). Further, the dining room of the narrator's host is an apartment "well up toward heaven" far away from the busy streets of London. The room itself is low-ceilinged like the cabin of one of Melville's ships, enhancing the image of the ship-like microcosm of the Temple. Yet this characterization is not unqualified; irony seeps in between the various descriptions. The historical Knights-Templars, although sworn to celibacy, were not monkish recluses - they actively and physically engaged life. The narrator's criticism of their lawyer-successors is not that they have become degenerate and rakish, but that they have willfully disengaged and withdrawn themselves from life.

Because of their withdrawal from life, the bachelors exist vicariously and neither produce nor create anything meaningful.(2) Over their sumptuous dinner, the bachelors, only engagement with life is through their conversation. They dwell not on larger questions of life but on the trivial, and they live vicariously through one another's stories about the past. One bachelor talks about his days as a student at Oxford; another talks about "old guild-halls, town-halls, and stadthold-houses" (321). What literary work they discuss is purely derivative: one bachelor is "translating a comic poem of Pulci's" (322). Despite their grand and glorious past, the Templars now produce nothing new; the lawyers serve only themselves, create nothing, and produce only clogs, hindrances, and embarrassments in "all the courts and avenues of Law" (318). These modern day bachelors have made a religion out of pleasure, but their self-indulgence results in sterility.

In form, the "Paradise" sketch itself mimics the lives of the bachelors, for it never really goes anywhere. It is slow paced and seemingly without a larger purpose other than to amuse the reader. Further, the conclusion of the "Paradise" section is anti-climactic; nothing at all happens. The bachelors drift off "two by two" (323), still talking, but saying nothing. There is an organic unity between content and form here, because the sketch-like form of Melville's narrative appropriately corresponds to his material; the still-life quality of the sketch accurately portrays the static quality of the bachelors, lives. The narrator's deliberate casualness, however, is deceptive; this deceptiveness becomes more apparent when the next section of the work, about the hellish existence of mill workers, throws life at the Temple into high relief.