{"id":331,"date":"2012-10-01T18:08:04","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T22:08:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.briancroxall.net\/lit-tech\/?p=331"},"modified":"2012-10-01T18:08:04","modified_gmt":"2012-10-01T22:08:04","slug":"widening-of-social-gaps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.briancroxall.net\/lit-tech\/2012\/10\/01\/widening-of-social-gaps\/","title":{"rendered":"Widening of Social Gaps"},"content":{"rendered":"

Herman Melville\u2019s The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

In the first section The Paradise of Bachelors<\/em>, we are introduced to a relaxed and eloquent atmosphere in which the affair is described as the \u201cabsorption of good living, good drinking, good feeling, and good talk\u201d (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.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, the next section of Melville\u2019s anecdote is described in stark contrast to the first. In The Tartarus of Maids<\/em> we are shown an extremely different environment with \u201cblank looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper\u201d (Melville 1270). The repetition of the word \u201cblank\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The structure of Melville\u2019s 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. <\/em>The two separate sections of the text are symbolic of the two separate sections of society that have been even further widened by industrialization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Herman Melville\u2019s 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<\/p>\n