Category: Student posts

In our current society, men and women are more or less equals. However, when “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” was written, this wasn’t the case. Not only was there inequality between sexes, there was inequality between social standing as well.

First Melville starts by describing a night where a group of wealthy bachelors all get together for a feast with “innumerable niceties” (Melville 1262). The men have no cares at all in the world, as they are all unattached to wives or children and do not ever have anxious thoughts about them. The men care only about each other, which becomes clear when Melville mentions that “the nine bachelors seemed to have the most tender concern for each other’s health.” (Melville 1262) For example, they only drink if all of them will drink. This one night is described as “the very perfection of quiet absorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk.” (Melville 1264)

After the narrator leaves the feast he rides his horse to a nearby factory. Right away it becomes apparent that this place is far below the “heaven” that was described earlier. And straight away, it is clear that the women, or girls, in this story, are inferior to men. This is clear when you are introduced to the first girl; a girl whose “face is pale with work, blue with cold and eyes supernatural with unrelated misery.” (Melville 1270) Right after, another male is introduced who is obviously in charge and he is described as a dark-complexioned and well-wrapped personage. The narrator is invited into the factory and once again, the inferiority of these girls comes to light. They are being used as slaves to the machinery. He describes them simply as “mere cogs to the wheels” of the machine. (Melville 1271) The girls are compared to mares halted to a rack, symbolizing that they are nothing more than animals to the factory owners. When the narrator questions why the girls are in such bad shape, the factory owner an ignorant, heartless comment about it. (Melville 1274)

There is so much inequality between the wealthy men and the working women in this story that even the narrator finds it disgusting. He, himself, makes note that where he has visited is the polar opposite to his Paradise of Bachelors, and that’s saying something.

The paper that we consistently use has a long restless process involved in its making. The paper that we sometimes waste by balling up and throwing away has the sweat of the restless people producing it embedded. We do not stop to think how much work is involved into making the “blank” paper in front of us. In Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Titarus of Maids,” the labor required to make paper is exposed. The machines that were used to make the paper were referred to as “iron animals” (1271) as they did not operate themselves, but rather by humans. The women that worked in the factory had their lives taken by their labor for the machines. “Rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands,” was the description that provided the setting to the paper mill. It was evident that the women working did not have a life outside of the factory. Their life had no purpose beyond their labor in the paper mill and that is why they are described as blank. The blankness in their life was reflected upon the blank paper that they processed.

What caught my attention the most was that the women in the paper mill were referred to as girls. At first, I thought that the workers were indeed girls until the narrator questioned the boy who was giving him the tour of the paper mill. His response was that “the fact of their being generally unmarried” did not give them the title of women, but rather girls. In today’s society, a female is no longer considered a girl after they reach the age of sixteen. After, they become teens and then woman. The factory wants only steady workers that work twelve hours a day year round. The women who worked their basically had to decide if they wanted to have a family or job. That to me was extremely inconsiderate on the employer’s behalf because every person is born with the right to one day have a family if they choose. The women in the paper mill had to decide if they wanted to work to make a living or create a family. The employer’s conditions were extreme and unfair because the women were turned into maids of the machines. The machines were kept running by the service that the women provided, but yet the machines seemed to reeive more appraisal than the women. The women and their labor were unappreciated which I think is morally incorrect.

While there seem to have class difference and gender inequality between the bachelors and the maids, in reality, they all share empty hearts and meaningless lives. For the bachelors, even though they are living paradisial lives, their existence is isolated from the real world, and they are missing out in lives. For the maids, their dull expression reflects to their thoughtless mind, and the machines in the paper-mill have dehumanized them, similar to what happens in the Life in the Iron Mills. Therefore, the bachelors and the maids’ lives and hearts are actually paralleled with each other, despite that they are living in seemingly different lifestyles, heaven and hell.

Living in fancy lives, the bachelors, like the girls in the paper-mill, are living an isolated life from the world. Melville detail description about the bachelors’ living condition shows that their paradise is separated with the London society. He describes, “the whole care-worn world the slip, and disentangled, stand beneath the quiet cloister of the Paradise of Bachelors,” (Melville 1275). From this passage, it is obvious that the bachelors are distant to the real world, since they are indifferent, disentangled and quiet to the world. Further, because the bachelors are isolated from the society, the bachelors miss out on a part of life experience , which is to challenge themselves. As the narrator says, “Pain! Trouble!… No such thing,” (Melville 1264), there is no obstacle in the bachelors’ lives. It is only by breaking through the challenges that people can feel the sense of accomplishment for their hard works. Although the bachelors are carefree and disconnected in their lives, deep in their hearts, they are empty and are living meaningless lives.

For the girls, they are apparently living miserable lives in the paper-mill with machines that dehumanize them. The working condition is also isolated and brutal, as the interminable work keep them away from society and other thoughts. There is much evidence in the story where the girls have completely devoted themselves to their works and machines. Melville describes, “The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels,” (Mellville 1271). From this quotation, we can infer that eventually, the girls get dehumanize and become part of the machines. When the girls are separated away from the real society, they turn into heartless machinery that live meaningless life. Both the bachelors and girls are having empty hearts and living in the border of the society without know what is the real world like, no matter how luxury or miserable their lives are.

The short stories, “The Paradise of Bachelors” and “The Tartarus of Maids,” show great contrast between the living experiences of the bachelors and maids. As explained by my fellow classmates, it is evident that the narrator closely details the extreme polar conditions of these two groups of people. Full of knowledge and literary scholarship, the well-to-do bachelors enjoy a life of merriment and abundance which they seem to communicate and share together. However, the maids become objects of desolation and misery through the harsh working conditions they face. After further examination, I have come to understand that the narrator also uses the setting of each story to show this difference.

In the initial passages of “Paradise of Bachelors,” we are given pleasant images of the Temple, both natural and artificial, that display the freedom of comfort that these men are allowed to experience. They are allowed to “sip [their] leisure in the garden” or “worship in the sculptured chapel,” to act in whatever manner that appeals to them as bachelors in all the beautiful places of the Temple (1257). The beauty of the Temple’s environment makes it conducive for doing any activity. It makes the Temple accessible to them at any moment and gives them the freedom to make use of its attractive resources. These bachelors are not affected negatively by the outlook of their surroundings, but are motivated to enjoy their lives in the Temple. “The narrator himself describes the Temple as a city of its own, filled with “flower beds…. courts, banquet halls, cloisters…” The temple is aesthetically pleasing, and if it is a big as a city, it provides these men with the luxury of living and experiencing this abundance of provisions for their own gratification.

On the other hand, “The Tarturus of Maids,” immediately presents us with the dismal environment that surrounds the paper mill. The author explains that gusts of snow “blast piercingly and shrilly” and that “mountains stood pinned in shrouds…a pass of Alpine corpses,” creating a completely lifeless environment (1268, 1269). The stillness of the surrounding contributes to the severe lifestyle of the girls because they become depressed from the monotony and dullness of what they see around them. They are unable to enjoy the peacefulness of their homes, but must work as frozen and solemn as the mountains that surround them. They are strongly affected by the bleakness and dullness to the point where they do not talk even to one another. The fact that these girls keep silent explains that they have adapted to the lifelessness of their surroundings. The harsh weather and natural conditions do not leave any hope for their lives, and this is not worth speaking about. Also, the paper mill is referred to as the “Devil’s Dungeon,” or a “Dantean gateway”, signifying hell, the place where people there are made to suffer without rest (1266). These descriptions are extremely cruel and frightening, but they portray the harsh intensity of factory work in this paper mill. The girls undergo continuous physical labor and are subjected to twelve hours of work every day for an entire year. It only depicts the factory as a place of torment and cruelty and shows the girls’ misery and pain as they work in such a place.

My question is quite different from my blog post. I was just wondering that, the owner of the factory happens to be a bachelor, who is cruel not only to the girls, but strict with the narrator. This totally goes against the character of bachelors from the story “The Paradise of Bachelors.” I wanted to ask from the points of view of both stories, “Who are Bachelors?”   “Are they just selfish pretenders, or what?”

Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” clearly demonstrates how technology dehumanizes society. The first half of Melville’s story depicts the upper-class bachelors who eat gluttonous meals, relax, and separate themselves from humanity. However, when one bachelor goes out into the industrial world he sees that not only are the bachelors detached from reality but also the technology of the new factories subjects its workers to nothingness.

The paper mill factory is located in the “Devil’s Dungeon” (Melville 1266). When the readers first come across this name, many negative connotations arise. The evil, mysterious and gloomy images that accompany both devil and dungeon set the scene for what takes place inside of the factory. The devil can be seen as the factory, an all-encompassing negative force that controls all the workers that work for it. While the dungeon signifies how the workers are trapped inside of the paper-mill working “twelve hours to the day, day after day” (Melville 1278).

When the bachelor first goes to the “Devil’s Dungeon” to see the paper mill factory, he is in awe with the great machine that produces the paper. He spends multiple pages describing all the machine is capable to do as the “great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy” (Melville 1278).  The technology has been heightened to be an impeccable force that ultimately becomes the dictator. The technology controls the lives of the people and the girls become only “mere cogs to the wheels” (Melville 1271) of the machinery. The technology defines the society. All are impressed with all the technology’s capabilities, but no one pays attention to the girls running the factory. The bachelor constantly compares the girls to the blankness of the paper, blank counters and the “pallid incipience of the pulp” (Melville 1277). These comparisons delineate the fact that these girls are empty. The people working in the factory are barely thought about because they are barely living. They are merely robots aiding to their mother machine. The industrialization and use of technology takes away the qualities that make the girls human, as they are no longer alive.

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.

Some people in today’s world identify Wall-Street as “the model” for American capitalism. Others recognize Wall Street as a conglomerate of financial mercenaries. A parallel can be drawn between Wall Street and Industrialism. People believe Wall Street to be a world of wealthy bystanders that don’t acknowledge the human life suffering outside of it. In The Tartarus of Maids, Herman Melville portrays a world conquered by machinery; a world where human life become slaves to industrialism. He describes machinery as “that [which] vaunted slave of humanity-here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan” (Melville 1271). In other words, he states that human life is subjugated by machinery such as slaves are oppressed by owners. Melville incorporates the metaphorical ideas of life and death to paint the consequences of industrialism on humanity. Melville believes that while industrialism has given birth to a new form of economic power and wealth, it has simultaneously destroyed the very lives that keep the industrial machinery running. I agree with Melville that the new technology powering machinery becomes an instrument that creates and destroys life at once.

Melville draws a parallel between the machinery of industrialism and the bodily functions of women. When the narrator travels to the paper-mill, he notices a river running through Devil’s Dungeon called the Blood River because of its “brick colored stream” (Melville 1266). Melville’s description of the valley resembles a woman’s menstrual cycle. In addition, when Cupid guides the narrator to the ‘great-machine’, he detects this “strange, blood-like, abdominal heat” (Melville 1274) in the room that makes it difficult to breathe. These words attest to the parallel between the industrial machinery and human reproduction. This alludes to the fact that industrialism gives life to the few men that are well employed and wealthy, such as the narrator. However, Melville goes on to imply that the industry completely strips the reproductive responsibility of women, leading them to a life similar to death.

As the story concludes, the narrator asks the factory owner, “Why is it, Sir, that in most factories female operatives of whatever age, are indiscriminately called girls, never women?” (Melville 1278). The factory owner replies because they are generally unmarried. The factories “will not have married women…[because] we want none but steady workers” (Melville 1278). In other words, they are unable to become women because of their enslavement to industry and therefore, must forever be “girls” or as the factory owner describes them, “maids” (Melville 1278). The industry has stripped these girls of marriage and motherhood. This idea is further emphasized when the narrator compared the worker’s potential to John Locke’s comparison that, “the human mind at birth to a sheet of paper” (Melville 1276). Melville implies that these childless women now serve the reproductive interests of the paper mill. The parallel between the human mind and the paper suggests that industrialism has taken away the beauty of being a woman and as a result, these women become lifeless.

Similar to “Life in the Iron Mills”, Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” portrays a society in which some must suffer in order for others to live comfortably. The gap between upper and low class in this society is a direct result of industrialization, as the maids in this mill live miserably in order for the bachelors to live extravagantly. However, unlike Hugh, the narrator in this novella finds that the sought after lives of the upper class actually lack substance. The narrator feels that industrialization has negatively impacted both the upper and lower class, corrupting society as a whole

While the old Templars in the narrator’s society used the Temple Garden to prepare for battle, “the modern Templars now lounge on the benches beneath the tress, and, switching their patent-leather boots” (Melville 1259). Pre- industrialization, Templars were focused and motivated while the modern day Templar has become lazy and somewhat useless. The narrator expresses concern that the presence of technology is eliminating the drive to work hard among the upper class. He recalls that after drinking a sufficient amount of wine at the wealthy bachelors’ dinner, “[c]hoice experiences in their private lives were now brought out, like choice brands of Moselle or Rhenish..” (Melville 1263). The narrator sarcastically points out that he bachelor’s lives are so uneventful that the most private details of their lives are as trivial as deciding what brand of wine to buy. Although the people of the upper class in this society still have extravagant things during industrialization, they actually lead unfulfilling lives.

The lower class in this society is dehumanized by technology and the industrial age. The narrator refers to the mountain on which the paper mill where many poor women work as the “Devil’s Dungeon” ( Melville1266). This name suggests that the paper mill is place of punishment and torture for the people working there. After watching the lifeless girls work the machines at the mill the narrator notes that “[t]he girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cog to the wheels” (Melville 1271).  The workers seem to have lost their humanity and exist only to serve their machines. The torturous work at the mill has caused the girls to appear as though they are actually part of the machines they operate.

Technology and the industrial age have ruined this society by causing suffering among the lower class and promoting ignorance and laziness among the upper class.

Upon reading “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” I already had an idea about the contrasting worlds Melville was going to write about. Perhaps Melville was setting up a story foil, emphasizing differences by providing contrasting settings. Within these two stories, we are taken from a gluttonous social order of bachelors in London to the secluded factory near Woedolor Mountain. Accepting the obvious differences between both settings, we can agree that similarity exists between the paradise of bachelors and the tartarus of maids.

Isolation, the perfect ingredient for ignorance, keeps the divine world of luxury far from anything out of the ordinary. For the bachelors, their “Temple is, indeed a city by itself”, where the men miss out on a part of life that is necessary to explain the difference between paradise and Tartarus (Melville 1259). The isolation is not only geographical, but between the bachelors themselves. The lack of diversity within the group of bachelors brings about a saddening truth which is revealed when they all get together for a drinking session. The men share “all sorts of pleasant stories” about other times they indulged in ‘elaborate splendors” and things that are related (Melville 1263). They feast off the brilliance of each other’s lives, but there is no need to live vicariously because the men have nothing to be envious of.

However, I find this endless bachelor party deficient of the most important thing men want, sex. Is it true that a society of satisfied bachelors can exist without the longing for sex? Not in my opinion. Maybe Melville wants to keep women out of his story for his strong point of gender inequality, but in reality we do not find this type of man, and especially this type of bachelor. The term bachelor in itself puts an image of a young, sex driven, male type “Runaround Sue” character into my head, and I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking this way. But how is it that in “The Tartarus of Maids” the man that shows the narrator around the factory is named Cupid. After all it can’t be a coincidence that Cupid is the god of desire, affection and erotic love, and the name of man who works in a factory that is devoid of all those things. Cupid explains that they only hire “maids” because they are steady workers, assuming that married women are well off because of their husbands, or will not leave their husbands for secluded job. There is a subtle similarity between the “blank paper” and the maids that work in the factory that make it (Melville 1272). Both are in abundance, useful for one thing, and easily replaced. A sad reality.

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?