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

Yet the symbolism associated with the girls and the machines shifts and even becomes contradictory as the narrator attempts to convey his horror at their working conditions. He describes the machines as "iron animals" fed and served by the factory girls, yet the narrator also associates the mill employees with animal imagery. In the linen shredding room, the workers stand at "manger-like receptacles ... like so many mares haltered to the rack" (329). This shifting symbolism does not represent mere confusion on the part of Melville,s narrator. The shifting relationship between the women, machines, and animals instead represents increasing horror on the part of the speaker, as the blankness and sterility of the women transmute them into dumb animals.

The obvious focus of the "Tartarus" section is on continuous production, yet the women themselves create nothing; instead, paper is produced from them, and their sterility is itself a product of the factory. Red water does not produce pale cheeks, as the narrator initially hypothesizes. It is the mill that has drained the color from their cheeks, and it is their blood that powers the mill. The narrator intuitively comes to understand this, as he "seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls [he] had eyed that heavy day" (334). Melville's symbolism is somewhat ponderous, but effective nonetheless. The girls in their enforced sterility are as much products of the factory as the paper is. They become objects to be pressed and molded into useful commodities, just like the paper they help to produce. The narrator heightens this comparison by observing that the foreheads of the "young and fair" maids become "ruled" just like the foolscap they produce (328). Like the bachelors, the mill girls, lives are in suspension. They live not as individuals, but solely to facilitate the production of paper that "All sorts of writing would be writ on . . . sermons, lawyers, briefs, physicians, prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on, without end" (333). This list of papers represents the major events of a life. And, significantly, many of them would be documented by lawyers. Yet the policies of the mill owner and the realities of life as a mill worker deny most of these experiences to the women-except for the death-warrant.

Enclosed and suffocated by their machinery, the mill girls have themselves become blank and have lost their individuality and the very qualities that make them human. The blank paper in turn inspires the narrator to think

of that celebrated comparison of John Locke, who, in demonstration of his theory that man has 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. (333)

Melville's and the narrator's point is that the mill girls have no souls - they are nothing but blank copies of human beings. Horrified by this revelation, the narrator responds with both sympathy and empathy.