Talk:The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids

Article name

The article is currently named "Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids" - should this be "The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids"? --Midnightdreary (talk) 17:33, 18 December 2008 (UTC)

• Yes, the article should be named "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", but whoever started the article didn't even look at what was right in front of him/her. It's hard for me to contain my anger at this pathetic mistake—and I can see that it's stood for more than two years. Unfortunately I don't know how to correct it. Scrawlspacer (talk) 09:54, 11 September 2011 (UTC)
  • Actually, I just discovered how to do it—and I did it. Scrawlspacer (talk) 10:04, 11 September 2011 (UTC)

Upon reading this article, it is evident that the author only read "The Tartarus of Maids". The story in fact has two parts; the first is obviously the Paradise of Bachelors, of which no mention is made in this article. The paradox the author mentions is between the two "chapters" of the short story, not inherent only in "The Tartarus of Maids". This article is therefore blatantly incorrect, and needs a complete reworking. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.237.194.122 (talk) 10:22, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Deleted original research (or poorly sourced material)

Two banners were at the top of this article as of September 11, 2011. One referred to a lack of citations, and the other to original research. Both were true.

So, to correct both problems, I've deleted about 98% of the article. I thought, though, that I should put it here in case anyone decides that s/he can source the material adequately. Otherwise, it can stay here as a monument to misguided, even if interesting, writing.

So here's the text in question:

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But these two worlds are connected in ways that are not immediately apparent.

One of the story's themes is seclusion versus isolation: The London bachelors are tucked away in a comfortable, privileged corner where they are not affected by the cares of the world. The New England maids, by contrast, are isolated in a rural nowhere. The seclusion of the narrator and other characters is what really adds to the eerie feeling found throughout the story. Although this short story often cannot be classified, it lines up with all the characteristics of American Gothic. It was originally published in Harper's New Monthly Magazine.

== Analysis ==

The title alone holds its own meaning, The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids . The Paradise of Bachelors sees the Devil's Dungeon paper-mill as a profit soaked business thriving with virgin women doing all the work. The Tartarus of Maids looks at the factory, filled with single, virgin women that are referred to only as "girls", as a type of exploitation and slave labor. This shows the type of exploitation found all over the country in factories in this time frame. The actual word Tartarus, is used in Greek mythology to represent an underworld where torture and suffering exist. Factory work was similar to slave labor and it embodies the ideas of torture like work and suffering. The narrator makes several references to the attitude with which Cupid sees the girls and the look of emptiness and pain in the eyes of these blank faced girls. So within the title is a paradox of a heaven, Paradise, and purgatory, Tartarus. These factory owners and managers look at these people as blank faces that have no names and don't matter, same in the story as in real life.

The narrator seems to be a very driven individual due to his dangerous journey to the Devil's Dungeon paper-mill. He encounters many landmarks and areas as he travels to the paper-mill. Once he arrives at the paper-mill he becomes disturbed with the blank, dull setting. All the girls have blank faces and the narrator makes repetitive claims about the blank images he sees as he tours through this paper-mill. Herman Melville incorporates a very spooky and eerie scene with this blank factory that is filled with slave like labor and dull individuals. The description of these girls and scene makes this story very spooky and almost gives you a feeling of some hidden agenda that is really going on. Melville uses only the narrators self thoughts and descriptions to explain the journey from the start of the story, to the paper-mill and traveling through the mill itself. This slave like setting creates many thoughts in a reader's mind as to what is really going on. Just when you think Melville is sending you down a path for some horrid event, the story abruptly ends and leaves you with an empty state of mind that nothing really occurred in this story besides a dangerous journey. This story is more about the meaning. The central idea or theme in the story is the presence of two parallel universes living within this paper-mill. The heaven (profit seeking upper class) and purgatory (poverty struck slave-like laborers) found in any industrialized factories in the late 19th century.

During the Industrial Revolution in the mid-nineteenth century, Americans capitalized on economic opportunity presented with the advent of railroads and the growing prevalence of factories throughout the country. The push for economic progress through industrialization became synonymous with democratic ideals, but Americans soon realized the price tag of this growth was high and incompatible with egalitarian principles. The reality was that these societal changes brought about economic divisions between the privileged class and the working class. Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and Tartarus of Maids” questions industrialization by exploring these class divisions and the power relations within them and concludes that it results in an exploitative system that thrives on both connection and isolation. The fusing of two stories—“The Paradise of Bachelors” and “The Tartarus of Maids” reinforces this point: although the two spheres are physically and emotionally separated, they depend on each other for their continuation.

The story is presented in two separate sections, the first of which—“The Paradise of Bachelors”—demonstrates that the bachelor lawyers are gluttonous consumers, yet they live out an empty existence. The story opens with images of the bachelors’ enclosure and isolation from the rest of London. Their Paradise is described as an “oasis” where a man can “disentangle” himself from the “care-worn world” (185). The Temple alone is a “city by itself” alternately described as a “honeycomb” and a “cheese,” both metaphors that emphasize the luxurious and excessive nature of life in the Temple (187, 189). Other images further develop this depiction of enclosure: “Like any cheese [the Temple] is quite perforated through and through in all directions with the snug cells of bachelors” (189). Further, the host’s apartment is “well up toward heaven,” a great distance away from the streets of London (190).

Yet a growing paradox seeps in between these descriptions. The historical Knights Templars, although they took a vow of celibacy, were not monkish isolators—they actively engaged life. Melville states that their modern day decedents have been reduced from “from carving out immortal fame in glorious battling for the Holy Land, to the carving of roast-mutton at a dinner-board,” implying that, although the bachelors appear to have fulfilled lives, their self-indulgent existence, insulated from demands of life, is no substitute for the meaningful, laudable existence of their predecessors (186). [the bachelor’s isolation not only geographically but emotionally from the rest of society] "The thing called pain, the bugbear styled trouble," the narrator states, "these two legends seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations… how could they suffer themselves to be imposed upon by such monkish fables? Pain! Trouble! . . . No such thing.—Pass the sherry, sir" (193, 194). But, pain is a part of life. In order to fully experience the gifts of life, one must face pain. By isolating themselves from the aspects of experience that appear unappealing, the bachelors miss out on a part of life that is necessary to understand. The Knight’s Templar’s lawyer successors are not criticized for becoming decadent and jaunty but rather for willfully withdrawing from life.

Because of their disengagement, the bachelors live empty lives, disconnected from the present and direct experience and thus removed from truth. Their only interaction with life is through their conversations over dinner in which they avoid the larger questions of existence and instead focus on the trivial, telling “pleasant stories” of the past (192). Although their isolation appears seductive, conviviality and leisure only go so far. The bachelors are incapable of enjoying themselves outside of their own company. They know not the personal fulfillments of outward spiritual and cultural challenges. Despite their previous accomplishments, the Templars now produce nothing new; the lawyers serve only themselves, create nothing, and produce only embarrassments in "all the courts and avenues of Law" (187). They now have nothing to contribute to the society that provides for them. These modern day bachelors have made a religion out of pleasure, but their self-indulgence results in sterility.

In the second part of the story, “The Tartarus of Maids,” the maids live a miserable life of unending, dehumanizing production; they even become products themselves to the machines they are slaves to. The interminable work at the factory drains the women until they are as blank as the sheets of paper produced as a result of their labor. The narrator comes across a maid whose face is “young and fair” and realizes she has not been there long enough for the factory to take its toll on her as it has her neighbor, whose brow is “ruled and wrinkled” (201, 202). The factory not only ages the women but also tyrannizes them the same way they control the paper with which they work.

In “The Tartarus of Maids” Melville uses a number of signifiers that suggest a relationship between the machinery in the industrial factory and the labor of child birth. The first indication of this metaphor occurs when the narrator comes across “Blood River” which gets its name from its brick color. This landmark, combined with the description of the machine room as “stifling, [with a] strange, blood-like abdominal heat,” implies a relationship of the narrator’s first experiences with the factory and a woman’s menstrual cycle (196, 206). Again the machinery is given woman-like characteristics in the way the elderly maid who sits at the end of the machine catches the sheets of paper as they come out. The insinuations here are truly significant as they suggest the absolute invasiveness of industrialism: no longer needed for childbirth, women serve the reproductive interests of industry.

Melville’s story implies that, because industry is replacing reproduction, the death of humanity is imminent. The reference to John Lock’s analogy of newborns to paper as well as the narrators description of “rows of blank-looking counters [and]… blank-looking girls with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper,” creates a parallel between the women and the paper (201). Yet, unlike the paper, which has the possibility of turning into “sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death warrants, and so on…” the women have no such potential (208). This notion is further indicated as the workers are consistently referred to as “girls,” incapable of becoming women which, as implied in the story, is achieved through marriage and motherhood. The story implies that industry interferes with reproduction and thus with the security of humanity. Without procreation society’s death is inevitable.

The metaphor of childbirth and continuous references to death combine to assert that while industrialism has given birth to a new form of economic power it has at the same time destroyed the very lives which keep it running. As the narrator travels to the factory, Hellman alludes that he is about to enter Hades. The paper mill is concealed in “The Devil’s Dungeon” at the bottom of a valley indicating hell-like surroundings (196). Other allusions to evil are the “Dantean gateway,” the “rude, wooded ruin,” and the fact that the area surrounding the factory is described as “a pass of Alpine corpses” (195-197). The factory itself is frequently referred to as a sepulcher, a large burial chamber, and death is again insinuated as the narrator watches the women sharpen the blade that cuts the paper; he observes that they are “their own executioners, themselves whetting the very swords that slay them” (205). The girls are trapped in a system that not only demands exhaustive labor but also their childlessness and eventual death.

Although the two realms of Melville’s works are separated both geographically and ideologically from each other, they are equally important contributors to understanding industrialism’s oppressive system. As illustrated in “The Tartarus of Maids,” the bachelor’s superior position depends on the underprivileged maid’s labor. This notion is emphasized with the division of the narrative into two separate stories. The gap between stories illustrates the gap between people. But, neither story is complete without the other, exemplifying the interdependent relationship between the maids and bachelors—neither group can survive without the other, and, in addition to their counterparts, both depend on isolation.

The machine —the god of the industrial age— guarantees the division of the wealthy and the workers through emotional separation. This structure functions on necessary connection as well as isolation. The laborers are oppressed by the obliviously content aristocracy, and these two groups remained separated by the dehumanizing effects of the machine. The living and breathing person takes a back seat to the new technology, causing the workers to become something less than human. Machine imagery is used throughout Melville’s text to describe the factory workers: “The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels” (202). And later, they are referred to as being “like so many mares haltered to the rack” (203). The maids are married only to their machines; husbands or children would only disrupt the factory process and slow industrialization.

The two parts to Melville’s tale are not merely a contrast; they present a revealing juxtaposition which ultimately shows how each world makes the other possible. They simply cannot exist without each other. The indulgent and comfortable life of the bachelors is supported by the work-weary women of the paper mill. Paradise is purchased by the bachelors at the expense of the maids. It is even significant that the product manufactured by the women is paper. It is the paper that allows the lawyers to maintain their lofty position in the world. At the conclusion of the work, the narrator exclaims, “Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! And oh! Tartarus of maids!” (211). This exclamation indicates not only empathetic feelings for the mill workers but an understanding of the relationship between the two ways of life. The narrator rethinks his original position that the bachelor’s life is paradise after he sees firsthand at what cost it comes. This epiphany is the crucial point of the work; it shows how industrialization drives a wedge between society, leaving an extraordinarily wealthy higher class and an overworked, underpaid lower class. The prosperity that accompanies industrialization actually results in the dehumanization of both classes and is thus incompatible with egalitarian principles.

== References ==

• Melville, Herman. "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids", April 1855.

== Similar Works ==

"Young Goodman Brown", Nathaniel Hawthorne (1835)

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So that is the deleted text. I hope the way I've set it apart—both on the page as it stands and in the editing box—is clear enough and serves the purpose. Scrawlspacer (talk) 10:36, 11 September 2011 (UTC)