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 is not affected sentimentally, as is the narrator in many of Irving's sketches, but physically and viscerally as his body mimics the appearance of the maids; this physical transformation symbolizes his growing understanding of his experiences.(6) "When he first enters the folding room, the narrator,s face begins to resemble the faces of the factory girls: a white spot appears on each of his cheeks. The white spots are the physical, visible symbol of the knowledge he has so painfully gained. The mill owner helps the narrator temporarily rid himself of the physical spots, causing him to feel "a horrible, tearing pain" (329), but he cannot rid himself so easily of the knowledge that he has gained. And yet the narrator's emotionally and physically sympathetic response alters nothing within the mill. The only thing that changes is the narrator himself. Although he questions both Cupid and the mill owner, his revulsion against the mill experience is inarticulate to them; he verges on fainting rather than action. And as Bruce Bickley points out, despite his horrifying vision in the mill, the narrator continues to place his order (93-94). Yet the questions that the narrator asks Cupid and the mill owner indicate his engagement with this experience. He is not merely a passive observer, for in this instance he seeks to look beneath the surface of experience.

The questions that he asks are very specific, but they are loaded with multiple meanings. For example, he asks Cupid, "You make only blank paper; no printing of any sort, I suppose? All blank paper, don't you?" (329). Cupid responds, "Certainly; what else should a paper-factory make?" (329). Language clearly fails them both. The narrator is unable to express the questions he really wants to ask, and Cupid apparently does not sense the narrator,s confusion. But the mill does produce more than white paper - it produces a continual stream of interchangeable, lifeless maids.

Still the narrator persists with his questions in an attempt to gain some sort of concrete "truth" or "fact" to give meaning to his experiences. His final question is "Why is it, Sir, that in most factories, female operatives, of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?" (334). The mill owner explains why he never hires married women, but the narrator persists with his questioning in his desperation to comprehend at least something of what he has seen. Seeking affirmation for his understanding, he further inquires, "Then these are all maids," to which the mill owner ominously confirms, "All maids" (334). This confirmation, loaded with meaning as is the word "maids," fills the narrator with that "strange emotion" (334), and once again his body responds to the knowledge he has so painfully gained. The mill owner warns him: Your cheeks look whitish yet, Sir" (334).

Readers receive additional confirmation that the narrator has ultimately gained more from his experiences than just an understanding of the difficulties of female mill workers. His final exclamation, "Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!" (335), demonstrates that his experiences have enabled him to juxtapose the positions of the two groups and from that juxtaposition gain some sort of epiphany or insight. The relativeness of this understanding of truth is clearly an important idea to Melville. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael explains, "for there is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contrast. Nothing exists in itself" (55). The narrator of this story makes a similar revelation; only by seeing and comprehending the awful status of the maids can the narrator truly judge the privileged and yet self-inflicted sterility of the bachelors. There can be no paradise in Melville's world unless there is a hell; paradise is purchased by the bachelors at the expense of the maids. The retrospectiveness of the tale is doubled, for just as the narrator gains understanding through the juxtaposition of his experiences, so does the reader. The reader understands the implicit irony of the "Paradise" section only after reading "The Tartarus of Maids," when he or she understands the need for the referentiality between the two sections. The two parts to this work, then, become not mere contrasts, but a constant and ongoing dialogue. Mule the narrator never directly defines for the reader the exact nature of the revelation that he has made, his exclamation at the end of the tale indicates that perhaps he is able to grasp some larger truth from this dialogue of experience that he cannot or will not communicate to his readers. Taken together with the other two bipartite stories,(7) "The Two Temples" and "Poor Man's Pudding and Rich Man's Crumbs," "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" may dramatize a phase in Melville's career in which all truths and experience are merely relative. These dark and bitter stories may have acted as the testing ground for some of the ideas and techniques that Melville experiments with in The Confidence Man - a work in which truth becomes not merely relative, but undiscoverable.