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 Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" by itself demonstrates at least some doubt on Melville's part about the ability of language to convey meaning, a concern that Melville paradoxically can communicate only through the medium of language. Melville and the narrator's failure to indicate precisely the nature of the truth or understanding the narrator has gained is an indication of the limitations of language. Certainly images of representation through language saturate the text in the form of the seedman's envelopes, which are themselves likened to business letters, but ultimately these images of representation become terribly conflicted. The most obvious image of representation is the actual production of the paper, yet the manner in which this image is itself presented is decidedly negative and grotesque. Women are enslaved like animals to foster its production. Under these circumstances, representation cannot be seen as unconflicted. "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" is only one work, and it would be dangerous to speculate too greatly about Melville as an author based solely on this one story. Nonetheless, this story must represent at least some growing ambivalence on Melville's part toward the issue of representation.

Melville's efforts to strike through and break beyond the limitations of the short story and the sketch, to reach beyond the limitations of language, led to his creation of the two-part structure of "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." Rather than proving to be a weakness or flaw, this structure and the blending of genres in this work allow the narrator to engage in a dialogue with himself about experience, understanding, and truth. While the paradise of the bachelors has its obvious merits, they purchase it at the expense of workers like the miff women and through the bachelors, own sacrifice of experience. The only truths that the bachelors can gain will be second-hand, and the narrator has already demonstrated his doubts to us about the sterility of second-hand knowledge. In terms of his own writing, withdrawal from life was not a privilege that Melville himself could afford, since his greatest works are drawn in part from his own experiences and indeed celebrate their protagonists, engagement with life.

Works Cited

Bickley, R. Bruce. The Method of Melvilles Short Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1975. Dillingham, William B. Melville Short Fiction 1853-1856. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1977. Fogle, Richard Harter. Melvilles Shorter Tales. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1960. Foner, Philip S. The Factory Girls. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1977. Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick. New York: Norton, 1967. _____. "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids." The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces, 1839-1860). Vol. 9 of the Northwestern-Newberry edition of The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford et al. Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern UP and Newberry Library, 1987. 316-35. Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Reviews. New York: Library of America, 1984. Shaw, Valerie. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction. New York: Longman, 1983. (1) Readers perceive the majority of this irony only in retrospect, as I argue later in this essay. (2) Fogle and Dillingham both provide excellent discussions in their respective books of what it means to be a "bachelor" in this work as well as in other works by Melville. The lack of commitment that they describe, however, ultimately manifests itself as disengagement from life on the part of these lawyers. (3) His picturesque descriptions heighten the contrast between these two environments. The cords of wood stacked outside the mill stand "crosswise" and "[glitter] in mail of crusted ice" (327), thus recalling the narrator's descriptions of the Knights-Templars of earlier times. (4) In the introduction to his anthology of writings by female factory workers, The Factory Girls, Philip S. Foner argues that the label "girls" was "precisely what they called themselves, the militant, as well as the genteel" (viii). We should not, then, underestimate Melville's emphasis on "maids" as a variation of "girls." (5) No wonder the former nurse found "business is poor in these parts" (333) and left nursing to become a paper handler. (6) Although Melville and the narrator are obviously not one and the same, it is reasonable to draw some parallels between them. The narrator's empathy for the factory girls may well derive from Melville's own sense of being constantly forced to produce to alleviate his desperate financial situation. (7) Dillingham uses the word "bipartite" to describe these stories, arguing that "One [part] builds upon the other; the effect is cumulative" (8).