Herman Melville’s The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids highlights the differences between the social classes. Specifically, this work describes how technology has facilitated a severe widening in the gap between the rich and the poor. Melville demonstrates how industrialization serves to increase the fortune of the wealthy and worsen the squalor of the poor. There is a clearly two categories of men in this industrial society; those that have conquered it and those who have fallen prisoner to it.
In the first section The Paradise of Bachelors, we are introduced to a relaxed and eloquent atmosphere in which the affair is described as the “absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk” (Melville 1264). These men have come out on top of technological advances and as a result live a luxurious life. This wealth allows them to concern themselves with trivial matters such as drinking and decorations. Their control over industrialization has only served to make the bachelors wealthier, therefore widening the social gap.
On the other hand, the next section of Melville’s anecdote is described in stark contrast to the first. In The Tartarus of Maids we are shown an extremely different environment with “blank looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (Melville 1270). The repetition of the word “blank” in this passage emphasizes how the lives of the maids are monotonous and only concentrated around work and making a living. Unlike the bachelors, these maids have no time for trivial concerns. They have come out on the lower side of technology, and therefore are essentially slaves of technology. Technology is their only way to make a living, and as a result they are subservient to it. Industrialization worsened the conditions of the poor, and made them more subservient members of society.
The structure of Melville’s text also follows the notion that technology widened the gap between the rich and the poor. Although this is fairly obvious to us at the time, this was a new idea at the time that Melville wrote The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. The two separate sections of the text are symbolic of the two separate sections of society that have been even further widened by industrialization.
Good points, Erica, especially the focus on “blank.” At the same time, it’s worth looking into what people who live in the Temple tend to do and asking whether or not they are truly associated with technology.
I agree with your point that industrialization in this society has widened the gap between the upper and lower class. The maids suffer at the paper mill while the bachelors reap the benefits. Although people must suffer in order for others to prosper in life, it seems as if the maids in this society suffer for no greater purpose. While their hard work at the mill contributes to the bachelors’ wealth, the bachelors don’t do anything worth while with their riches. Technology causes the rich to become richer and more powerful and the poor to become poorer and more helpless.
I agree with your overall statement that technology has widened this social gap because it has put the poor in an even more precarious position than before. Another point you could have made was that the bachelors use the paper without even thinking about it and take the technology and its functions for granted, while the women enslave themselves for barely any wages and become nothing in the process.
Erica, I agree with your statement that the impact of technology has caused a widening between the wealthy and the poor. As you clearly stated, those people that were wealthy before industrialism only became wealthier with the new wave of technology. Melville connects the two stories when Cupid reveals to the narrator that the factory owner is also a ‘Bach’ (bachelor). Here, Melville explicitly reveals the relationship between the Bachelors’ high-living life and the engine, which feeds it.