A bachelor lives a carefree life of a single man with no worries and nothing to tie him down to one place. They worry about their professions and temporarily stay at entertaining places like Melville’s Paradise of Bachelors. It is only when these men step outside of their untroubled lives that they realize the world has terrible effects on some of its inhabitants.
When the narrator visits the paper mill, he finds young girls tending the machines for twelve hour days in intolerably cold weather. He watches them slave away at paper making, folding, and ruling. As a rosy cheeked boy tours him around the paper mill, “sheet –white” girls line the factory walls, working as machines (Melville 1274). The narrator simply wished to purchase paper for his own job, since he used so much of it, but never thought about the process of paper making and how awful it could be.
When the man witnessed the harsh conditions the young maids suffered through, he not only felt disturbed, but guilty about purchasing so much paper each year. He thought when he saw the large paper machine, “But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it” (Melville 1277). Sure, the machine completed most of the paper making process, but the girls were still needed to complete it, even dying because of the job.
Many people are guilty of only focusing on the outcome and ignoring the process. The narrator never thought about the paper making process and the people and conditions that were involved. Many people in society simply grab a product from a shelf without giving the production that created it a thought. Melville writes about not only the quality of factory life but also questions the morals behind purchasing the products made at the factories. It is only after his tour that the narrator realizes the paper mill is not, “…they very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors” (Melville 1269). While consumers believe products such as paper are necessities and pluck them off of shelves without a second thought, we must ask ourselves: is the product worth the production process?
Rebecca, I agree that people are ignorant of the labor workers and the conditions they live in. However, asking whether the product is worth the production process is personally not a concern of mine. It seems that the laws of economics dictate this question. The consumer is not at fault, it is the company, the politics behind the nation, and the unity of people that labor over the product that can make a substantial difference.The guilt a consumer feels is an economic ploy to buy other products that make you feel selfless, like TOMS shoes.
Sam, if it’s not a concern for you, will it be a concern for anyone?
I didn’t make the connection between the story and the real world….very true. Society does not even think about how products are made, they just want them in their possession. The women in the story work extremely hard to make the paper, that they perhaps turn into the product. They devote their lives to their job, yet get little in return. Melville writes to possibly educate us and to help us realize an ongoing problem in society that we do not consider the amount of effort put into making certain products. I personally feel, as well, this is a growing problem in our present society.