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 narrator himself is the most important link between the two sections of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." The passivity of the narrator in "The Paradise of Bachelors" disqualifies him as a protagonist because he is essentially an inactive, although ironic, observer. But in "The Tartarus of Maids," the narrator changes to reflect again the guise of those around him. The narrator is still observing, this time in an almost voyeuristic fashion, but he responds viscerally, rather than cerebrally, to the scene surrounding him. His engagement with his experiences disrupts the sketch-like structure of the first part of the work, and his actions themselves transform "The Tartarus of Maids" into something that more closely resembles a story or a tale than a sketch.

From the very beginning of the "Tartarus" section, the narrator establishes a constant pattern of referentiality that sends the reader back to the "Paradise" section. "The Tartarus of Maids" opens with a description of Woedolor Mountain and the mill, paralleling the narrator's initial description of the Temple. The quarters of the women are likewise enclosed; mountains, rocks, and snow hem them in on all sides. The mill girls too are cut off from the rush of life, well away "from the traveled highway" and "that bustling main-road" (326). But their quarters are singularly bleak, with a "cheap, blank air" and a "comfortless expression" (326). Upon seeing the mill for the first time, the narrator is struck by "something latent, as well as something obvious" (326) that reminds him of the Temple-bar.(3) There is nothing "obvious" in this scene to remind the reader of the Temple except for the repeated images of enclosure. Yet this reference begins the pattern of constant referentiality between the two sections of the work. The second part of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" continually sends the reader back to the first part, but that first part gives the reader no hint of what will follow. This curiously deliberate strategy provides a direct hint to the reader not to separate the two sections but to read them as a piece. If, as some critics have argued, this later section of the work is more rich with meaning, it is so because the intentional emptiness of the "Paradise" section helps us understand the denseness of the "Tartarus" section.

The very label the narrator uses to identify the female factory workers immediately establishes them as the female counterparts of the bachelors of the Temple. Like the word bachelors," the label "maids" resonates with meaning.(4) The girls in the mill are maids in two senses: physically and in relation to the machines they tend. The mill owner explains: "For our factory here, we will not have married women; they are apt to be off-and-on too much" (334). So the owner hires only young maidens, who grow old in attendance on their machines. Working "twelve hours to the day, day after day, through the three hundred and sixty-five days" (334) the maids have little opportunity to change their status. Their sterility is enforced by the terms of their employment; to marry, become fertile, and possibly have children would mean losing their jobs. The female mill employees are also maids in another sense.(5) They are "tame minister[s]" (328) and handmaidens in attendance on the machines, a service the narrator finds dehumanizing. The blank white girls are thus counter-images of, sterility in the midst of the perverse fecundity of the machines.