In the opening pages of Reveries of a Bachelor, Donald Grant Mitchell spins out a fantasy of a bachelor’s paradise inspired by Melville’s Typee (1846): “Shall this brain of mine, careless-working, never tired with idleness, feeding on long vagaries, and high, gigantic castles, dreaming out beatitudes by the hour—turn itself at length to such dull task-work, as thinking out a livelihood for wife and children?… Can any family purse be better filled than the exceeding plump one you dream of after reading such pleasant books as Munchausen or Typee?” (Reveries 10,11). Although some antebellum critics criticized Melville and called him “Munchausen” for passing off an extravagantly false narrative as truth (Charvat 216), Mitchell rhapsodizes over his power to imagine a male paradise devoted to pleasure and dreaming. By invoking Munchausen and Typee, Mitchell promotes idealism and offers the bachelor’s fantasizing and rambling as alternatives to bourgeois productivity. Likewise, the nineteenth-century “common reader” identified Melville “as a free-wheeling bachelor-sailor with a gift for narrative” (Charvat 263).
Although readers of Melville’s early works associated him with bachelorhood, his own attitudes toward the bachelor were more complicated. Whereas Mitchell casts the bachelor as a dreamer full of feeling, Melville exposes the emptiness and narcissism of bachelor dreams in fictions of the 1850s such as Pierre and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Melville hinted at his disdain by naming two fictional ships after the bachelor figure. One, the Bachelor (from Moby-Dick), represents the errors of materialism, while the other, the Bachelor’s Delight (from “Benito Cereno”), reveals the falsities of idealism. As the Pequod cruises towards its tragic confrontation with Moby-Dick, it encounters the Bachelor, a ship bound for its home port of Nantucket. The Bachelor is bursting with sperm, which spills out of barrels, sailors’ chests, coffee pots, and any other available vessel. On the Bachelor’s decks mates dance with Polynesian women who have eloped with them. While the Bachelor’s captain watches the spectacle in amusement, Ahab scowls in “gloom”: “as the two ships crossed each other’s wakes—one all jubilation for things passed, the other all forebodings as to things to come—their two captains in themselves impersonated the whole striking contrast of the scene” (451-52). Whereas Ahab is determinedly pursuing his quest of Moby-Dick “against all natural lovings and longings” for his wife and child (493), the captain of the Bachelor professes not to “believe in him at all” (452). Two world-views run in opposite directions: the monomania of the husband who abjures family in pursuit of his quest, and the frivolity of the bachelor Bachelor captain who rejects mystery and floats on proven success. Here, the Bachelor presents the figure of sensualism and materialism. In “Benito Cereno,” however, Melville criticizes idealism by dubbing the ship captained by the naively charitable, blindly racist Delano the Bachelor’s Delight. Whereas the Bachelor treats life as a party, the Bachelor’s Delight embodies a superficial benevolence and the ignorant assumption that the real world matches Captain Delano’s idealized sense of order.
These two ships of fools represent the poles of a common epistemological problem: one navigates the world through frivolous indulgence while the other sails on abstract sympathy, neither fully committed to creativity and truth. By presenting two models of the bachelor, the active sensualist and the brooding idealist, Melville criticizes the failure to wed conflicting aspects of humanity, body and mind, real and ideal. As John Wenke observes, Melville “tends to celebrate the human need to forge a balance between experiential and intellectual extremes, to accommodate disparate possibilities for selfhood, to maintain flexibility and freedom within limits prescribed by natural existence” (“Ontological” 587). One of the chief ways that Melville explores this dichotomy is through the bachelor. Just as the dandy can “teach us of sudden metamorphoses” (Feldman 270), one might expect Melville to treat the bachelor as a figure of openness, flux, and experimentation, given the bachelor’s tendency toward reverie and lack of solid commitments. Instead, Melville associates the literary bachelor with a selfish, foolish absolutism, a tragic failure to reconcile imagination and experience
Most of Melville’s protagonists are single men, including Typee’s Tommo, Redburn, White Jacket, Ishmael, Mardi’s Tajii, Pierre, and Billy Budd’s Captain Vere. However, he reserves the term “bachelor” not for rovers such as Ishmael and Tommo, but for selfish authority figures like Redburn’s Captain Riga or superficial scholars like the narrator of “Bartleby.”[1] While Melville’s early work betrays his ambivalence toward the bachelor, from Pierre forward he undercuts the bachelor figure to repudiate the idealism promoted in works such as Mitchell’s Reveries of a Bachelor. Conscious of the stereotype of the detached, leisured “old bachelor,” Melville uses “bachelor” to signify a mental attitude based upon privilege, artificiality, and deliberate ignorance of the broader social world. While young rovers such as Ishmael and Tommo pursue social (and sometimes sexual) relationships, Melville’s bachelor often isolates himself from society, lacks the broader sympathy that enables him to look beyond his own limited perceptions, and produces shallow, derivative texts.
Critics have noted Melville’s frequent use of the bachelor, but have not yet offered a full analysis of its significance. For instance, Laurie Robinson-Lorant contends that “Redburn is one of Melville’s ‘bachelors,’ a man whose limited exposure to real life and privileged position in society blind him to the moral complexities of life,” emphasizing the bachelor’s elitism and obtuseness (207). Likewise, Robert K. Martin argues that Melville uses bachelors “to suggest the removal of the individual from the world of social relationships, from Ahab’s ‘inter-indebtedness.’ As bachelors, they inhabit a sterile world in which work leads to no creativity” (Hero 105). Merton Sealts observes that “From at least the time of Mardi, undertaken not long after his own marriage, Melville had repeatedly used bachelors—bachelors and sophomores—as his favorite examples of pleasure-loving immaturity and naivete, as yet untouched by misfortune” (159). Associating the bachelor with middle age rather than youth, Michael Davitt Bell argues that “Melville’s typical persona in the short fiction of the 1850s is an unambitious middle-aged bachelor” (214) and connects this persona to moral blindness, the lack of self-awareness, and the failure of revolutionary ideology. As astute as Martin, Robinson-Lora, Sealts, and Bell are in claiming that Melville uses the bachelor to reveal the problems of blindness, withdrawal, and privilege, they make these observations only in passing, declining to explore how or why Melville develops his criticisms of bachelorhood. This chapter seeks to understand Melville’s complex attitudes toward the bachelor figure by considering his work of the 1850s (post-Reveries of a Bachelor) in relation to the antebellum literature of bachelorhood as well as to his views on art and the artist. Through his frequent references to Plato’s Symposium and to Greek myth, Melville suggests the importance of eros in shaping art and repudiates a dualism that values the ideal over the real.
By rejecting the bachelor, Melville repudiated the strategy that some masculine sentimentalists used to deal with the American bias against fiction. As we have seen, antebellum American authors faced “a hostile climate, a climate in which the fictionality of fiction was accentuated and condemned” (Bell 14). By posing as a genteel bachelor observer who lacked artistic ambition, Irving rendered his writing harmless. Mitchell more actively justified fantasy by focusing it on the home and infusing it with sentiment, crafting a bachelor speaker who was intimate yet detached. However, Melville evinced greater ambivalence toward both dreaming and the bachelor dreamer. In plunging into Mardi, he declared to his publisher his intention to “out with the Romance, & let me say that instincts are prophetic, & better than acquired wisdom” (Correspondence 106). Even as Melville proclaimed the superiority of imagination and instinct, he acknowledged that fantasy can lead to error, writing that “Things visible are but the conceits of the eye: things imaginative, conceits of fancy. If duped by one, we are equally duped by the other” (qtd. by Charvat 216). In his fiction of the 1850s, Melville wrestled with the problem of how we know what we think we know, making the bachelor embody the errors of philosophical idealism.
In Mardi (1849), Melville imagines what would happen if a bachelor ran the kingdom, centering government on his own fantasies and pleasures rather than the common good. Through his satire of Abrazza, the “care-free bachelor” and king (588), Melville exposes the hypocrisy and emptiness of the bachelor sensibility, ostensibly sympathetic but fundamentally driven by the selfish desire for power and pleasure at the expense of others. Abrazza demands that his subjects endanger themselves by diving for pearls to decorate his “royal robe,” promising to bestow his pity on those who are injured even as he belittles their pain: “He vows he’ll have no cares; and often says, in pleasant reveries,--‘Sure, my lord Abrazza, if any one should be care-free, ‘tis thou; who strike down none, but pity all the fallen!’ Yet none he lifteth up!” (589). Perhaps using this “king-philosopher” (589) to satirize Plato’s philosopher-kings in the Republic (Sealts 288), Melville shows that Abrazza’s “hollow” kingdom is a built around fantasy and supreme ego (590), thus illustrating the dangers of absolute idealism (and absolute power). Frequently in reverie, the bachelor king removes himself from real problems, disdaining those who do not feed his fantasy. Not only is Abrazza cruel, but he also lacks the ability to comprehend inspiration, genius, and art. When he discusses the author Lombardo with Babbalanja, Abrazza betrays a simplistic view of the writing act, contending that it involves no real labor, that authors must be motivated by wine or money, and that literary works must be “unified” (597). As Charvat contends, “Against the Abrazzas of the world the writer must put up defenses” (229). Abrazza embodies the errors of sensual idealism, whereby the dreamer claims to be reaching for the ideal but really seeks to serve his own selfish needs.
Melville commonly links the bachelor and idealism, especially in works published after Reveries of a Bachelor (1850). In Moby-Dick, Melville acknowledges both the allure and the danger of the bachelor’s penchant for fantasizing. In “The Mast Head,” Ishmael describes “romantic,” “melancholy” young philosophers gazing down at the sea from their celestial perches:
those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home… lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadences of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature… But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. (152)
Here Melville seems to satirize two of Donald Grant Mitchell’s works— Lorgnette, in which the keen-eyed bachelor scrutinizes the crowd through his opera glasses, and Reveries of a Bachelor, in which the sentimental bachelor rhapsodizes over the pleasures of fantasy. As John Wenke argues, this passage illustrates “the incompatibility of philosophical idealism and workaday actuality” (“Ontological” 586), as dreamers and philosophers get pulled into the mystical and are then drowned by reality. Even as Melville acknowledges the seductiveness of reverie, he differentiates the self-aware Ishmael from the dreaming bachelors.
In Moby-Dick’s “Squeeze of the Hand” scene, Melville articulates the conflict between the tender merging of bachelor brotherhood and the more “objective,” rational life of the husband. In a moment of homoerotic sexual communion, the sailors together squeeze lumps of sperm from the whale carcass, sometimes grabbing each others’ hands and enjoying “abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling” (385). Yet Ishmael concedes that such fantastic bliss can only be temporary:
Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hand in a jar of spermaceti. (385)
As he suggests that the immersive sexuality of this scene must be displaced by the concreteness of marriage, where everything has its place, Melville sounds a note of resignation. Although Ishmael finds the homoeroticism and idealism of the scene enticing, Melville suggests that the productive sexuality of marriage—based upon stable things rather than fleeting feelings and abstract ideas—ultimately wins out. According to Merton Sealts, here Ishmael registers his “repudiation of the Platonic scale of values” by shifting “from the realm of intellect to the realm of tangible entities” (310). Yet the passage is more ambivalent than Sealts suggests, since Melville wistfully describes the allure of idealism and sexual communion even as he acknowledges its impermanence and the impossibility of fulfillment.
In examining Melville’s relationship to sentimental culture and idealism, I focus on selected bachelor works from his middle- and late-periods. Critics such as Ann Douglas, Richard Brodhead, and Samuel Otter have noted that Melville shifted his strategies, style, and purposes when he wrote Pierre (1852), attacking the sentimental culture that he associated with his own failures in the literary marketplace. I treat Pierre as a troubled parody of the sentimental novel, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” as a sly revision of an Irvingesque tale of a traveler, and “Rip Van Winkle’s Lilacs” as a poetic revamping of Irving’s classic tale that asserts the importance of contingency and accident in artistic creation and appreciation. Despite differences in style, genre, and tone, these works all make use of the bachelor to repudiate idealism, to satirize sentimentalism, and to criticize the model of the artist as detached dreamer.
When Melville heard that his friend Charles Fenno Hoffman, an author and editor, had been committed to an insane asylum, he suggested that his status as a bachelor and an artist had contributed to his insanity: “he was just the man to go mad—imaginative, voluptuously inclined, poor, unemployed, in the race of life distanced by his inferiors, unmarried,--without a port or haven in the universe to make…”(Correspondence 128). Inventorying the qualities typically associated with the bachelor artist, Melville contends that a man is more susceptible to madness if he rejects the bourgeois values of work, family, and home, which anchor him to reality. Yet Melville also acknowledges that “he who has never felt, momentarily, what madness is has but a mouthful of brains” (128), asserting that the imagination can plunge a person into a “riot” of maddening dreams as well as stimulate philosophical insights. Even though Melville embraced the power of the imagination, writing in Moby-Dick that “man’s insanity is heaven’s sense”(383), he also believed that the imagination “clearly undermined conventional conceptions of reality, including the distinction between imagination and judgment” (Bell 146). Pierre was cited by reviewers as evidence of Melville’s own poor aesthetic judgment, even insanity; one critic asserted that “his fancy is diseased, his morality vitiated, his style nonsensical and ungrammatical, and his characters as far removed from our sympathies as they are from nature” (The American Whig Review, November 1852, qtd. in Melville Log 464). I suggest that, rather than exposing Melville’s “diseased fancy,” Pierre reflects how Melville employed the bachelor stereotype as a way to explore what makes the fancy diseased.
Pierre charts the ironic slide of the bachelor from light-hearted swain to tortured prophet and finally to mad nihilist, exposing the sexual tensions, philosophical errors, and elitist assumptions that contribute to this descent. In writing Pierre, Melville claimed to be crafting a book that was, as he told his publisher Bentley, “very much more calculated for popularity than anything you have yet published of mine—being a regular romance, with a mysterious plot to it, & stirring passions at work” (Correspondence 226). Moreover, as Melville advised Sophia Hawthorne, in Pierre, “a rural bowl of milk” (Correspondence 219), he aimed to please a female audience. Yet Pierre, which sold only 1856 copies over 35 years (Charvat 249), is more a bowl of curdled milk, with its clotted language and sour plots of incest, murder, suicide, and artistic failure. In attempting to produce a work that would appeal to the popular audience, Melville ended up intensifying what William Charvat calls his “conflict with his readers” (204), troubled by the conditions of popular success and by the demands of sentimental culture. As Melville famously declared to Hawthorne, “Dollars damn me... What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,--it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot. So the product is a final hash, and all my books are botches” (Correspondence 191).
Frustrated by the seeming impossibility of meeting his artistic ambitions, Melville lashed out at American literary culture as well as at the reading public. In a chapter titled “Young America in Literature,” Melville lampoons critics for valuing “Perfect Taste” and respectability over originality and vision, publishers for regarding books merely as products to be marketed, female readers for treating Pierre as a pawn in parlor society, and men’s literary societies for celebrating fame rather than genius. As Ann Douglas argues, “Melville presents a savage study of the conspirational interaction between genteel religion, feminine morality, and polite literature against the interests of genuine masculinity” (294). Yet Pierre’s grand ambitions are treated as savagely as the superficiality of readers, as Melville reveals “the everlasting elusiveness of truth; the universal insincerity of even the greatest and purest written thoughts” (Pierre 339). Citing such statements, many critics contend that Pierre marks a turning point in Melville’s career because he seemed to surrender the hope of coherence. Analyzing Melville’s attempt to write a sentimental romance that would attract a popular audience, Richard Brodhead argues that Pierre represents Melville’s “ambivalence, his desire both to make use of this genre and to assert his independence from it” (Hawthorne 164). According to Michael Rogin, in writing Pierre Melville moved away from writing romances animated by closely observed detail to authoring surreal, formalist fictions built around binaries. Focusing on Pierre’s distorted, incoherent style, Samuel Otter argues that Melville rejected the possibility of breaking outside of subjectivity. Building upon these arguments about the ambivalence and incoherence of Pierre, I suggest that Melville’s turn toward explicitly bachelor narratives exposes his frustrations towards artists, the making of art, and, indeed, the work of art itself, frustrations that are funneled through the figure of a male dreamer.
Subtitled The Ambiguities, Pierre focuses on problems of epistemology, the difficulty of knowing what is true and understanding how we know (Sealts 321). Pierre breaks his engagement to Lucy so that he can pretend to be the spouse of his supposed half-sister Isabel, creating a world of artifice and lies. If, as Katherine Snyder argues, literary bachelors are “threshold figures” who expose the tensions in discourses of masculinity, domesticity, and artistic production (7), then Pierre represents these tensions to an exaggerated degree. Wobbling at the ever-shifting center of the novel, Pierre is pulled by an overwhelming array of opposed forces: dark lady vs. fair angel, mother vs. father, consumption vs. production, patriarchal inheritance vs. democratic self-making, genteel vs. professional authorship, and the “perfect ideal” vs. “the miserable written attempt at embodying it” (273). Initially a caricature of the pastoral swain, Pierre becomes a multifaceted oxymoron—an innocent sinner, a near-blind visionary, a loving murderer, a bachelor husband. Failed artifice illustrates the incoherence of language and character—for example, the deceptive letters of Glen, the seductive music of Isabel, the hollow philosophy of Plinlimmon, the terrifying painting of Beatrice Cenci and the false painting of Pierre’s father, and Pierre’s failed masterwork. As a painful meditation on the deceptions of art, Pierre is itself slippery and duplicitous, allowing the reader no comfortable resolution.
As Hershel Parker and many others have noted, Pierre seems disrupted, even bifurcated, by the section on “Young America in Literature,” which appears just after the protagonist has fled his patriarchal estate and arrived in the city to create a new life. According to Parker, in its original form Pierre lacked these sections and was more symmetrical in its construction, so his Kraken edition omits them altogether (xi). Yet these chapters provide an important point of transition where the novel shifts from focusing on the perversions of love to a disturbed analysis of the delusions of artistic ambition. Gillian Brown rightly suggests that at this point the novel switches from a parody of the family novel to an exploration of literary individualism, but she misjudges the significance of this transition (135). Rather than, as Brown argues, endorsing the autonomous masculine author freed from domesticity, Melville treats this figure with ambivalence, as he reveals the impossibility of avoiding domesticity and the foolishness of the bachelor’s self-centered perspective. As Tara Penry argues, Melville presents two dominant models of manhood in Pierre: romantic manhood, which implies rebellion against patriarchy and the resulting attempt to create oneself anew, and sentimental manhood, which is built on the formation of relationships and the clasping of hands. By comparing bachelors to Titans, Melville suggests that bachelorhood constitutes a lonely rejection of sentimental manhood, no matter how much the bachelor tries to compensate for this lack of connection through dreaming. Yet romantic manhood—the solitary struggling of Pierre—leads to defeat and misery. Through his portrait of the artist, Melville illustrates the failings of American literary culture, which is divided between the shallow gentility of Pierre the juvenile author and the Platonic hubris of the Apostle Pierre.
Like Reveries of a Bachelor, which had been published only two years earlier, Pierre presents a bachelor as its protagonist and examines dreaming, detachment, and the analogy between writing and character. Rather than using a whimsical, garrulous first person narrator such as Ik Marvel or Ishmael, Melville employs an ambiguous third-person narrator, who announces the impossibility of understanding “the confusions and confoundings in the soul of Pierre” (171) and declares him a victim of “Civilization, Philosophy, Ideal Virtue!”(302). Whereas many readers regarded Ik Marvel as a sentimental exemplar for his flowery effusions over imagined loves, Melville’s nightmares of the bachelor picture the decline of a man who rejects marriage, is tormented by seemingly irreconcilable conflicts, invents a “blasphemous rhapsody” (356), and ends up declaring himself to be neuter. Exposing the ironic underside of the sentimental bachelor, Melville shows that his idealism is narcissistic and deluded, his detachment leads to isolation and self-righteousness, his spectating reflects back his own sinfulness, and his art is impotent.
Typically the marriage plot resolves conflict and integrates the characters into a harmonious family. However, as befits a novel so troubled by ambiguity, Pierre refuses the happy ending, focusing instead on fractured ambitions and failed union (Otter 239). Reversing the narrative trajectory of a comedy or romance, the novel begins happily, with Pierre and Lucy swearing their “boundless admiration and love” (4). Of course, as James Creech argues, Melville ultimately attacks the normative family, depicting the mother as a Gorgon, the father as a liar, the “sister” as a manipulator, the cousin as a competitor, and the girlfriend as a threat despite her seeming innocence (84). Yet it is Pierre’s ironic decision to pose as a husband while remaining a bachelor that obstructs the happy ending and brings about the disintegration of his family. Melville insists
that not always doth life’s beginning gloom conclude in gladness; that wedding-bells peal not ever in the last scene of life’s fifth act… yet the profounder emanations of the human mind, intended to illustrate all that can be humanly known of human life; these never unravel their own intricacies, and have no proper endings; but in imperfect, unanticipated, and disappointing sequels (as mutilated stumps), hurry to abrupt intermergings with the eternal tides of time and fate. (141)
By rejecting the conventional ending of a wedding, Melville instead builds a “profounder” novel around bachelorhood, which is a state of incompletion, a union yet to be made. As he inverts the marriage plot, Melville takes the bachelor narrative to an exaggerated and ironic end, emphasizing the bachelor’s isolation despite the sentimental presence of surrogate sister-wives, his blindness despite his visionary impulses, and the impotence of his art in spite of his paternal ambitions. In Pierre, love is distorted by incest, illegitimate birth, fear of sexuality, jealousy, and celibacy. None of these relationships result in legitimate offspring, and each, in its way, exposes the falsity behind the “smoothness and genteelness of the sentiments and fancies expressed” in Pierre’s works as a juvenile author (245), thus undercutting the conventions of sentimental fiction.
What disrupts the marriage plot is Pierre’s discovery of his apparent half-sister Isabel. Ironically, Pierre had fantasized that the brother/sister relationship would serve as a prototype for the tender balance of marriage:
So perfect to Pierre had long seemed the illuminated scroll of his life thus far, that only one hiatus was discovered by him in that sweetly-writ manuscript. A sister had been omitted from the text…. He who is sisterless, is as a bachelor before his time. For much that goes to make up the deliciousness of a wife, already lies in the sister. (7)
Melville mocks Pierre’s naiveté on two levels: first, his notion that the relationship between siblings parallels that of spouses, and second, his assumption that life unfolds like a novel (although in this case of course he is correct, given that Pierre is a fictional character caught in the convoluted plot of a novel). As we have seen, conventional views identified marriage with a harmonizing of masculine and feminine, but the fake marriage between Pierre and Isabel upsets this balance. The sibling bond is more ambiguous than marriage; brother and sister are made from the same but different stuff. Although Pierre thinks of his life proceeding as a “sweetly writ” romantic narrative, Melville exposes the weak foundations of such sentimental stories, as Isabel introduces both “Tartarean misery and Paradisiac beauty” into his life (43).
If the life of the Glendinning scion Pierre has been on the surface a well-structured narrative, the orphan Isabel’s life is an incoherent manuscript. As she appeals to Pierre for sympathy, Isabel cries, “Oh, my dear brother—Pierre! Pierre!—could’st thou take out my heart, and look at it in thy hand, then thou would’st find it all over written, this way and that, and crossed again, and yet again, with continual lines of longings, that found no end but in suddenly calling thee” (158). To describe the incoherence of Isabel’s character and the deceptions of sentimental communication, Melville compares her heart to a constantly revised manuscript. By associating his characters with texts, Melville reveals the essential problem that Pierre probes: the difficulty of literary expression constrained by artificial genres, the limitations of the imagination and intellect to discern truth, and the ambiguity of moral action.
Just as the first half of the novel catalogs the ironies of love, so the second half satirizes different approaches to artistic creation. Pierre depicts five models of authorship, all of which are associated with the bachelor: the male sentimentalist, the naïve idealist, the greedy producer and consumer of commodities, the nihilist, and the deluded prophet. Initially Pierre appears as a sentimental bachelor:
For even at that early time in his authorial life, Pierre, however vain of his fame, was not at all proud of his paper. Not only did he make allumettes of his sonnets when published, but was very careless about his discarded manuscripts; they were to be found lying all round the house; gave a great deal of trouble to the housemaids in sweeping; went for kindlings to the fires; and were forever flitting out of the windows, and under the door-sills, into the faces of people passing the manorial mansion. In this reckless, indifferent way of his, Pierre himself was a sort of publisher. (263)
Like Irving’s Pindar Cockloft, Pierre “publishes” by letting his papers scatter about the house, and like Ik Marvel he turns the proceeds and products of his authorship into cigars, as the production of literature becomes like reverie, pleasing yet quick to vanish in smoke. A sentimentalist, the leisured author prefers to operate in the ethereal realm of ideas instead of the physical world of concrete objects. Rather than autographing young ladies’ albums, he “kiss[es] lipographs upon them,” since “actual feeling is better than transmitted sight” (251). Such statements echo Donald Grant Mitchell’s pronouncement that the dream is superior to reality. Embracing abstraction, the juvenile author refuses to commit himself to a single image; his autographs lack uniformity (253), and he declines to have a Daguerreotype taken, since “instead of… immortalizing a genius, a portrait now only dayalized a dunce” (254). According to Gillian Brown, Pierre’s avoidance of fame illuminates Melville’s hostility toward domesticity and the market (141-43). At another level, Melville satirizes the hazy idealism of male sentimentalists by mocking Pierre’s reluctance to allow his “genius” be captured in a physical form, whether an autograph or a photograph. Since Pierre’s own identity shifts with his emotions, no fixed icon can capture his essence.
To expose the failings of naïve idealism, Melville focuses on Pierre’s neighbors at the Apostles, a former church and lawyers’ office building that has become a haven for intellectuals and artists. Echoing his warnings against reverie in Moby-Dick, Melville characterizes the writers and philosophers who live at the Apostles as fools: “But these poor, penniless devils still strive to make ample amends for their physical forlornness, by resolutely reveling in the region of blissful ideals.… Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can not but give in to the Descartian vortices” (267). As David Leonard explains, Melville uses the vortex to represent a hell of meaningless, inexorable circular motion that pulls all in, so that transcendental faith in the imagination spins into pessimistic mechanism. Even the most inspiring ideas cannot satisfy a gnawing hunger, as Melville insists that the bachelor Apostles must operate within the constraints of the physical world.
Whereas the idealistic Apostles attempt to deny physical reality, the professional author focuses on the production and consumption of material goods, treating ideas as tokens that can be bought and sold. When he moves to the city and realizes that he must support the tangible needs of his household, Pierre decides to subject himself to the “metamorphosing mill” (246) of publication and commits himself to “literary enterprise” (285). Yet despite—indeed, because of—his labor over his writing, Pierre does not fit the mold of the professional author, since his aspirations go beyond just churning out pages for profit. While Pierre struggles over the dilemma that dogged Melville, the clash between “the burning desire to deliver what he thought to be new, or at least miserably neglected Truth to the world; and the prospective menace of being absolutely penniless” (Correspondence 283), the bachelor Charlie Millthorpe stands for a false compromise. Like a mill (hence his name), the “sophomorean” Millthorpe rapidly manufactures faux-philosophical works: “peculiar secret, theologoico-politico-social schemes of the masonic order of the seedy-coated Apostles; and pursuing some crude, transcendental Philosophy, for both a contributory means of support, as well as for his complete intellectual aliment” (276, 280). A genial scrivener, Millthorpe produces texts more to satisfy his appetites than to disseminate truth.
Whereas the hack writer Millthorpe focuses on production (of writing) and consumption (of the goods brought in through his literary efforts), the nihilist gives out nothing. Plinlimmon, the false prophet whose pamphlet haunts Pierre, embodies the emptiness of a philosophy that passively negates rather than confronts or resolves conflicts. Plinlimmon projects an attitude of “non-Benevolence”—not actively evil, but devoid of goodness (290). Just as some bachelors are defined by their renunciation of marriage and family, their deliberate embrace of nothing, so Plinlimmon negates affection, effort, or imagination: “He seemed to have no family or blood ties of any sort. He never was known to work with his hands; never to write with his hands (he would not even write a letter); he never was known to open a book. There were no books in his chambers” (290). In describing Plinlimmon’s separation from family or work, two defining spheres of nineteenth-century America, the narrator links his isolation with his unwillingness to read or write. If Plinlimmon is neither a reader nor a writer, he is all the more inscrutable, since Melville often presents character in relation to text.
Not only does Plinlimmon negate personal feeling, but he also seems to project nothing in others. The scene in which Pierre stares at Plinlimmon through a window reprises a common moment in bachelor literature, where the single man surveys life from his perch in the garret. But in Melville’s version of the scene, Plinlimmon, another bachelor spectator, stares back, so that Pierre is both looking and looked at. Rather than escaping from his own subjectivity through his window-sill reveries, Pierre receives a shocking vision of his own isolation. Pierre fears that the philosopher of nothing acts both as a microscope, scrutinizing his lies and sins, and a mirror, reflecting his emptiness. At this moment, Melville hints that Plinlimmon’s nihilism and Pierre’s idealism are intimately related. Through his utter failure to relate or react to what he observes, the fraudulent philosopher challenges the very foundations of sentimental literature: “For that face did not respond to anything…. If to affirm, be to expand one’s isolated self; and if to deny, be to contract one’s isolated self; then to respond is a suspension of all isolation” (293). Plinlimmon embodies complete detachment without any possibility of intimacy or sympathetic response.
In contrast to Plinlimmon’s complete passivity, Pierre aims to produce “some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth” (283). In reaching for divine truth, Pierre begins to think of himself as a prophet, declaring, “Isabel, I will write such things—I will gospelize the world anew, and show them deeper secrets than the Apocalypse!” (273). So great is his ambition that he believes he must abandon family relations, commanding Isabel to “Call me brother no more!” (273). Sadly, the narrator reveals Pierre to be a deluded prophet, characterizing him as an immature author attempting a mature work (282). Pierre resembles a prophet only in his asceticism, as he denies himself food and warmth while he labors in an unheated room that contains “an indigent bachelor’s pallet,” a crude desk made out of a board on two barrels, and little else (270). Through his excruciating description of the physical deprivations and emotional anguish associated with authorship, Melville undermines Pierre’s idealism and repudiates the assumption implicit in bachelor literature that writing consists of leisurely dreaming.
According to the knowing narrator, Pierre’s failures result from his rigid subjectivity, exaggerated ambitions, and deliberate isolation. By undermining Pierre’s perception of himself as a prophet, Melville dispels Platonic idealism, which, as we saw in Chapter 1, was frequently associated with the bachelor. “[S]illy” Charlie Millthorpe echoes this association by claiming Plato as the predecessor to the modern artist (338): “The great men are all bachelors, you know. Their family is the universe: I should say the planet Saturn was their elder son; and Plato their uncle” (281). By constructing this absurd genealogy, Melville parodies both the view of artistic tradition as smooth patriarchal succession and the assumption that the bachelor serves the greater good because he is not bound to a single family.[2] As the Titan Kronos in Greek myth, Saturn castrated and overthrew his father Ouranos to become king of the gods. To preserve his power, he consumed his own children, but his wife and sister Rhea (aka Ops) tricked him into swallowing a stone rather than his son Zeus, who ultimately revolted against his father and exiled him to Tartarus. Bachelor creators are likewise overthrown by artists of the next generation, so their godlike aspirations to negate family and assume power are thwarted.
Although Pierre aspires to become like a god through his authorship, he becomes instead a monstrous failure, a chastened Titan. As he labors over his book, Pierre “began to feel that in him, the thews of a Titan were forestallingly cut by the scissors of Fate” (339). The conditions of authorship and the “everlasting elusiveness of Truth” cripple and mock him (339). Indeed, in his “unnatural struggle” to produce a great work (340), Pierre becomes like the earth-born giant Enceladus, a monstrous product of incest whose rebellion against the gods fails: “still, though armless, resisting with his whole striving trunk… still turning his unconquerable front toward that majestic mount eternally in vain assailed by him” (345). Enceladus’s chastened defiance reflects Pierre’s own failures, as he is “mutilated,” “distorted,” “impotent,” and “shamefully recumbent” (345-6). By making Enceladus an icon of Pierre, Melville warns against men attempting to make themselves gods, since such celestial aspirations can only lead to monstrous “botches” and misery (Correspondence 191).
By dubbing Plato the bachelors’ uncle, Melville satirizes the association of the bachelor with the avuncular activity of philosophizing, questioning Pierre’s naïve attempt to produce “some thoughtful thing of absolute Truth” (283). Melville suggests that true art depends on the marriage of reality and the ideal rather than the subjective isolation of the artist. What most troubles Pierre is the conflict between soul and world, as he juxtaposes the Sermon on the Mount’s description of how the world should be with reality as experienced through the senses. Hence “the world seems to lie saturated and soaking with lies” (208). In responding to this clash, he can, like “good and wise people,” accept that despite all of the lies “there is much truth in this world,” succumb to pessimism or nihilism, turn to philosophy for truth, or rebel against the world’s lies and create his own truths (208). Ultimately Pierre chooses to reject the phenomenal world, instead diving into philosophy and becoming, in effect, a modern-day Titan. Still, Melville’s narrator disparages philosophy, calling Plato, Spinoza, and Goethe “self-impostors” who only pretend to know the truth (208).
Melville uses his bachelor philosopher to critique absolute idealism, as Pierre’s “psychological intimations and self-generated preconditions” lead to false understandings and self-destruction (Wenke 585). When he hears that Glen Stanley is wooing Lucy, Pierre finds that “there is no faith, and no stoicism, and no philosophy, that a mortal man can possibly evoke, which will stand the final test of a real impassioned onset of Life and Passion upon him” (289). Thus Pierre suggests that even seemingly detached authors are subject to the human emotions of desire, rage, and sympathy, which cannot but help distort how truth is perceived. As Merton Sealts argues, Pierre stands as a “virtual repudiation” of idealism and Platonic philosophy (319). In his zealous pursuit of a single truth, Pierre fails to understand that to create something original “all existing great works must be federated in the fancy; and so regarded as a miscellaneous and Pantheistic whole” (284). By suggesting that creative influences must be “federated in the fancy,” Melville echoes associationist psychology, which held that the real and the imaginary must be “mingled” to produce “valid,” truthful literature (Bell 18). Whereas the fictional author Pierre takes a celibate approach to creativity, detaching himself and focusing on the mind rather than experience, Melville himself endorses a more holistic, integrated approach to authorship, where different influences come together in the imagination.
Although Isabel’s arrival precipitates Pierre’s crisis, far deeper problems underlie his bachelorhood: his repression of eros, his insistence on purity and his fear of—yet fascination with—“tainting” his fiancée Lucy. The narrator compares Pierre and Lucy to “two Platonic particles, after roaming in quest of each other, from the time of Saturn and Ops till now” (27), alluding to Aristophanes’s myth in the Symposium, “which views each person as half of a unified primordial whole in search of the displaced complementary mate” (Wenke, Muse 173).[3] According to Wenke, Melville mocks the simple-minded assumption that an individual can complete himself or herself by finding his or her other half, but we can also see in this allusion a deeper desire for unity between real and ideal. The coming together of “Platonic particles” troubles Pierre, who imagines the contrast between himself as crude material and Lucy as the heavenly ideal:
This to be my wife? I that but the other day weighed an hundred and fifty pound of solid avoirdupois;--I to wed this heavenly fleece? Methinks one husbandly embrace would break her airy zone, and she exhale upward to that heaven whence she hath hither come, condensed to mortal sight. It can not be; I am of heavy earth, and she of airy light. By heaven, but marriage is an impious thing! (58)
Questioning whether marriage should be viewed as a balancing or a fusion, Pierre imagines masculinity crushing femininity, the physical evaporating the ideal. Melville implicitly links Pierre’s idealism and his bachelorhood, as he refuses (yet longs for) physical union. Pierre’s celibacy fits into larger patterns in Melville’s works, the false allegiance to the ideal and failure in holding two irreconcilables together in a dynamic balance.
Although Gillian Brown argues that Pierre replaces “sentimental nurture networks by a system of self-generation,” the novel shows that self-generation is not possible and that creation occurs in the context of social relations, no matter how fractured (160). Melville characterizes literary creation as an interactive, erotic process:
For though the naked soul of man doth assuredly contain one latent element of intellectual productiveness; yet never was there a child born solely from one parent; the visible world of experience being that procreative thing which impregnates the muses; self-reciprocally efficient hermaphrodites being but a fable. (259).
Explicitly rejecting the isolated subjectivity of the bachelor, Melville insists that genius requires a union of experience (which he tropes as masculine) and inspiration (which he characterizes as feminine). For Melville, experience is the active force that “fertilizes” the imagination and ensures that creative works reflect the context in which they are created. Pierre errs precisely in attempting to deny experience and depend solely on his intellect to produce literature.
Can a work as dark as Pierre—which ends with its protagonist gone mad and all of its main characters dead—offer any kind of satisfactory resolution? According to Wyn Kelley, Pierre rejects marriage and instead provides “a warped utopian alternative” (93), “monastic domesticity” or “domestic fraternity” (108, 109). However, it might be more accurate to say that Melville rejects an imbalanced marriage, where one partner dominates the other, while associating bachelorhood with repression and isolation. Kelley strains her argument by claiming that “Pierre resolves the conflict between the patriarchal house and maternal home by leaving both behind” (99). Pierre’s leaving is no resolution, but an intensification of ambiguity. In Pierre’s cramped quarters at the Apostles, he lives as a bachelor, brother, and utopian, but the dominant image is of his misery: “On either hand clung to by a girl who would have laid down her life for him; Pierre, nevertheless, in his deepest, highest part, was utterly without sympathy from any thing divine, human, brute, or vegetable. One in a city of hundreds of thousands of human beings, Pierre was solitary as at the Pole” (338). Herein lie the failures of sentimentalism, in that sympathy does not always yield comfort or understanding. Each alternative to marriage—the sibling relationship, homosexual romance, or bachelorhood—is shown to be tortured. Pierre ends by emphasizing the ambiguity and unknowability of its bachelor protagonist. As Millthorpe reads the paradoxes inscribed on Pierre’s body, noting the “scornful innocence” of his lips and the “woman-soft” hands of the murderer (362), Isabel taunts him and the reader by gasping, “All’s o’er, and ye know him not!” (362). In the end, Melville questions the power of language to describe a life, leaving the reader ultimately bewildered.
If, as Robert K. Martin has argued, “Moby-Dick’s resolution is hermaphroditic: the heterogeneity of the novel’s final shape is Melville’s attempt to create a form that encompasses forms, a ‘symphony’ or ‘marriage’ that brings together all opposites” (67), then Pierre challenges the possibility of encompassing opposites within a single form and creating something new. By tangling up the binaries that underlie sentimental literature, Melville has knotted himself into a bind. In the opening pages of Pierre, Melville depicts love as empty artifice, yet it seems to be the only alternative to the sterile, frustrated relationships anatomized in the rest of the novel. By criticizing Pierre’s idealism, failure to “federate” opposites in his imagination, and hubris in attempting to reject human needs, Melville dismantles the stereotype of the bachelor author and criticizes the assumptions of art built around this figure. Ann Douglas and others have characterized Pierre as an attack on feminine, sentimental culture—and on the reader who represents this culture—but the novel likewise challenges the model of the author as a bachelor dreamer. Indeed, Melville associates Pierre’s idealism with the bachelor’s abstraction, detachment, and pride:
There is a dark, mad mystery in some human hearts, which, sometimes, during the tyranny of a usurper mood, leads them to be all eagerness to cast off the most beloved bond, as a hindrance to the attainment of whatever the transcendental object that usurper mood so tyrannically suggests. Then the beloved bond seems to hold us to no essential good; lifted to exalted mounts, we can dispense with all the vale; endearments we spurn; kisses are blisters to us; and forsaking the palpitating forms of mortal love, we emptily embrace the boundless and the unbodied air. We think we are not human; we become as immortal bachelors and gods; but again, like the Greek gods themselves, prone we descend to earth; glad to be uxorious once more; glad to hide these god-like heads within the bosoms made of too-seducing clay. (180)
If such an ambiguous work as Pierre can be said to offer a moral, this is it: a warning against disavowing human bonds in the name of higher ideals, or isolating oneself in bachelorhood when the “uxorious bond,” the fusion of flesh and spirit, is really desired. The urge to surrender the “beloved bond” exercises a tyrannical power over the self and produces delusions of godliness. In aspiring to behave like a Titan in rising up against the conditions that limit humanity, Pierre ultimately must fall humbled and tortured to the earth, like Enceladus. Pierre exposes the failings of Titanic ambition: the false notion that pure imagination can lead one to truth.
Paper and Paradise: Melville’s Short Fiction
Following the popular and critical failure of Pierre, Melville turned to writing short fiction for Harper’s (edited by Donald Grant Mitchell and fellow sentimentalist George Curtis) and Putnam’s. “Perfect[ing] the deceptive art of the ironist” (Railton 192), Melville confronts the Irving tradition by writing short stories that on the surface seem smooth and approachable, but challenge readers with their submerged truths. In these fictions, Melville explores the conditions of authorship, Irving’s legacy, and the frustrated potential of American art, often through an “Ik Marvel” character (Douglas 315). In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855), Melville “challenge[s] the Irvingesque sketch as literary and social paradigm” (Hamilton 119), mocks the bachelor sensibility epitomized by Mitchell, and revisits the problems of creativity explored in Pierre. Whereas Irving’s bachelor narrator Crayon discovers “a refuge from modernity” through his rambles and reveries in the hidden parts of London (Hamilton 121), Melville’s perplexed narrator witnesses how the bachelor’s retirement can foster ignorance and lead to the suffering of others. Like Pierre, the narrator journeys from Paradise to Tartarus, yet he finds no Titans struggling to create great works of art, only blank mill maids producing paper while supervised by bachelor bosses. Through his tale of empty leisure and inhuman work, Melville reveals the essential dilemma that faces the author: the two prevailing models for authorship, the genteel amateur and the professional laborer, both circumscribe creativity and rob literature of its vitality.[4] Even as he acknowledges that unmarried men lack the husband’s financial obligations and therefore can more freely pursue art and scholarship, Melville satirizes the bachelor scholar by exposing the selfishness, impotence, and ignorance behind this pose.
In December of 1849, Herman Melville faced a choice between cultivating his art and fulfilling domestic obligations. Two months earlier, he had sailed to England to find a publisher for White Jacket and to gather experiences that would feed his writing. Just before he was to depart for America, Melville received an invitation to visit the Duke of Rutland’s Belvoir Castle, which he was eager to accept because “I should much like to know what the highest English aristocracy really and practically is” and because it offered “such an opportunity of procuring ‘material’” (Journals 41, 42). However, if he visited the Duke, Melville would have to delay his departure by a month, prolonging his absence from his wife and infant son Malcolm. Though he was sure that his brother and friends would think him a “ninny,” Melville decided to return home, writing in his journal, “Would that One I know were here. Would that the Little One too were here.... I am all eagerness to get home-- I ought to be home-- my absence occasions uneasiness in a quarter where I must beseech heaven to grant repose” (Journals 41). Melville’s capitalization of the term “One” to refer to his wife and son indicates that he felt a strong sentimental connection to them and that they represented a wholeness he desired.
Yet doubts underlie his intensifying iterations that desire, duty, and Christian sympathy compel him to go home. While in Europe, Melville lived the life of a cultivated bachelor, visiting museums and art galleries, browsing in bookstores, dining with intellectuals and artists, going to plays, and exploring historic sites. One evening shortly before his departure, Melville feasted with a “fine set of fellows” at the Elm Court in one of London’s Inns of Court, which he dubbed “The Paradise of Batchelors” because of its luxury and good cheer (Journals 44). Melville’s journal entry provides only a few details about the evening: his dinner companions included authors and the relatives of famous printers and artists, they dined on the fifth floor, and the evening reminded Melville of Charles Lamb’s stories of “Old Benchers.” Five and a half years later, Melville used his visit to the Temple as the basis for the first part of his diptych “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.”
In “The Paradise of Bachelors,” the tension between domestic obligations and the bachelor’s encumbered ease resurfaces, as Melville describes the vast appetites, small cares, and empty decorum of the lawyers who feast at the Temple. Whereas Melville’s journal entry simply reports his pleasure in the bachelors’ company, his tale criticizes their selfishness, lack of feeling, and ignorance of suffering. While abroad, Melville’s thoughts were frequently of home and family, but bachelors lacked the anxieties and guilt of separation. As Melville’s narrator reports, “you could plainly see that these easy-hearted men had no wives or children to give an anxious thought. Almost all of them were travelers, too; for bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their consciences touching desertion of the fireside” (Piazza 193). The bachelors’ carefree attitudes contrast sharply with the anxieties of a husband and father. Outside the monastic court of the Bachelors, Benedick tradesmen scurry past, “with ledger lines ruled along their brows, thinking upon the rise of bread and fall of babies”; they have become texts of men’s obligations to domesticity, their faces marked by worries about supporting a home (Piazza 316). By describing the Benedicks as imprinted paper, Melville lampoons the rhetoric of bourgeois self-making and emphasizes how domestic responsibilities stamp character.
Against the leisure and self-indulgence of the bachelors Melville poses “The Tartarus of Maids,” a paper mill where pale, silent women serve as handmaids to machines. By depicting men as leisured consumers and women as silent producers, Melville reverses conventional expectations of gender. Melville’s idea for this half of the diptych originated in a visit he made to a paper mill not far from his home in Pittsfield in 1851. Initially Melville’s view of the paper-mill lacked the dark irony so evident in “Tartarus”; instead of seeing the mill as producing human misery, Melville associated it with authorship. Commenting in an 1851 letter to Duyckinck on the paper-mill’s proximity, Melville joked: “A great neighborhood for authors, you see, is Pittsfield” (Correspondence 179). Melville’s jest turns on the assumption that proximity to paper promotes authorship in the same way that the easy availability of raw materials serves manufacturing. Melville even joked that the paper mill would enable communication with his ideal reader Hawthorne, as he suggested in a postscript to an effusive letter thanking him for his praise of Moby-Dick:
If the world was entirely made up of Magians, I’ll tell you what I should do. I should have a paper-mill established at one end of the house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand--a million--billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. (Correspondence 213)
Melville imagines the paper-mill as a machine that facilitates his imaginative productivity and establishes a bond between himself and Hawthorne (Hewitt 304). By bringing paper manufacture into the home, Melville makes it an essential part of intimate correspondence. As Melville’s ideal audience, someone who is “One” with him, Hawthorne becomes almost like a spouse, linked through the letter.[5] So much does Melville hope that Hawthorne’s admiration for Moby-Dick will deepen their relationship that he signs himself “Herman” for the first and last time in a letter to someone not from his family. Through the “endless riband” of paper, Melville can connect with Hawthorne, but still retain a separate identity (Hewitt 305-307).
In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” however, the paper mill becomes a symbol of the degradation and mechanization of human creativity, as Melville creates his most explicit inverted Paradise. Whereas Melville’s fantasy of the home-based mill centered on the idea of intense personal communication with Hawthorne, the paper factory in Tartarus produces cheap blank paper for bureaucracies and an anonymous populace. In part, we can find a biographical explanation for Melville’s shifting view of the paper mill. By the time that Melville wrote “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” the “infinite fraternity” he shared with Hawthorne had become all too finite, as communications between the two authors had almost ceased. Suffering, Melville insists, must go into the making of literature and character. However, the bachelors of Paradise attempt to defend themselves by launching “the heavy artillery of the feast,” denying the existence of pain, and immersing themselves in books such as the Decameron (Piazza 320), where feasting and storytelling provide an escape from the plague.
Critics have offered varying interpretations of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” arguing that it reveals Melville’s fear of sexuality and femininity, the devaluing of the human as a result of industrialism (M. Fisher, Rogin), the emptiness of sentimental literature (Post-Lauria), the exclusion of women from a society shaped around the male bond (Wiegman), or the pain of the writing process (Renker). Although all of these interpretations have merit, the prominence of the paper mill and the parody of bachelor men of letters suggest that the story is fundamentally concerned with authorship and the inadequacies of the Irvingesque bachelor as a model for the artist. By pitting “Paradise” against “Tartarus,” Melville deepens the allusions to Greek myth that were present in Pierre. Just as Pierre struggles with his authorship in his own hell, so the mill maids engage in the grim industrial process of creating the stuff of authorship, paper. In this ironic inversion of the conventional bachelor tale, the Old Bachelor is an industrial magnate, the philosophic bachelor is a fetcher of wine, and the young Cupid is a cruel taskmaster. Melville places his bachelor tale in the context of consumption (a fine bachelor feast) and production (maids at work in a mill), showing the costs of connoisseurship and the pain of creation.
David S. Reynolds contends that Melville is, in this and other diptyches, “retreating to easily perceived social dualisms” (161), but he overlooks the complex ways that Melville undermines these dualisms, among them rich/poor, England/America, male/female, and consumer/producer. Although he seems to pose the heaven of the bachelors against the hell of the maids, Melville shows that the two groups are both sterile, “disengaged” duplicators. Melville’s bachelors and maids have in common celibacy and books, since the bachelors contribute the rags that the maids transform into paper (and the maids contribute the paper that the bachelor authors turn into “rags”). Both occupy spaces removed from the main currents of society, although the bachelors operate in an Irvingnesque retreat of quiet contemplation, while the maids live in an allegorical landscape of suffering straight out of Dante. One might argue that Paradise and Tartarus represent the concept of philosophical dualism, given that Paradise is associated with the idealistic musings of the bachelor, whereas the maids of Tartarus seem to be automatons whose sole function is to produce physical objects. Yet the bachelor idealists are also sensualists who indulge in an elaborate feast, while Melville hints that the mill maids are really creating souls (or at least the symbols of souls). Although the two halves of the diptych differ in tone, both address what happens when selves become texts, when Locke’s mechanistic metaphor of the blank page dominates human and artistic creation.
In their smug self-absorption, the lawyers of the Temple seem to encompass the three senses of the word “bachelor”: they are unmarried men who fancy themselves aristocrats and scholars. Melville connects the bachelors to the decadent history of the Templars, former crusaders who were suppressed by the Pope in the fourteenth century because of allegations that they engaged in homosexual practices and pursued luxury: “Though no sworded foe might outskill them in the fence, yet the worm of luxury crawled beneath their guard, gnawing the core of knightly troth, nibbling the monastic vow, till at last the monk’s austerity relaxed to wassailing, and the sworn knights-bachelors grew to be but hypocrites and rakes” (Piazza 317). While the original (pre-decadent) Templars wedded themselves to an ideal, the modern Templars violate their “vows” and their “troth,” destroying their “marriage” to something beyond themselves. As a result, the bachelors have become like villains of seduction novels, “rakes” who dispel virtue through their shallow promises and manipulative language. Celibacy is a cover for decadence, Melville implies, whether the active “wassailing” of the Knights Templars or the passive excess of the lawyer Templars.
While the original Templars fought for ideas, the new Templars, lawyers and men-of-letters, dispute through language. With rhetoric as their weapons, the lawyers have surrendered the vigorous pursuit of truth and instead engage in games with words: “In what is now the Temple Garden the old Crusaders used to exercise their steeds and lances; the modern Templars now lounge on the benches beneath the trees, and, switching their patent leather boots, in gay discourse exercise at repartee” (318). With this image of lounging literary men, Melville raises the same concern that troubled Emerson and Thoreau: the scholar has disengaged himself from action and experience, encountering life only through language. As he describes lounging bachelors “switching” their feet, Melville suggests that they do not “stand up” for their ideas, but speak only for the sake of sport. By pointing out that such significant writers as Samuel Johnson and Charles Lamb belonged to the “Brethren of the Order of Celibacy” “tabernacled” at the Inner Temple, Melville satirizes the long association of the British man of letters with cloistered comfort and gentility (Piazza 319).[6]
The bachelor’s lack of commitment to truth results in a decline of art itself. By framing “Paradise” around nine bachelors, Melville implicitly compares them to the nine maiden Muses of Greek mythology.[7] Like the Muses, the bachelors are “free from care,” leisured, and (presumably) celibate.[8] But these male muses represent a degraded art, inspiring only themselves. Claiming that the “full minds and fuller cellars” of the bachelors entitle them to “universal fame,” the narrator calls out “set down, ye muses, the names of R.F.C. and his imperial brother” (318). The narrator’s invocation is a joke, as he fails to provide the full names that should be preserved in history and justifies the bachelors’ fame through what they consume as opposed to what they create. Unlike Clio, Erato, and Euterpe, the muses of history, love poetry, and lyric poetry, the bachelor muses mull over scholarly narratives about the “the private life of the Iron Duke,” the Low Countries, and student life at Oxford (320).[9] William Dillingham argues that these bachelors have metaphorically “not married themselves to an idea,” but the problem seems to be the opposite: they have focused too intently on their own hobby-horses (188). Although the bachelors fancy themselves cultivated, they embody an empty self-culture, self-indulgent and sequestered rather than socially engaged.
Instead of striving for truth and free expression, the bachelors uphold propriety. Melville illustrates the bachelors’ lack of philosophical depth by nicknaming their servant, who has been reduced to fetching wine and ensuring that the bachelors maintain decorum, “Socrates.” By including a diminished Socrates, Melville is likely making an inside joke about his failed aesthetic brotherhood with Hawthorne as well as his personal alienation from Platonic philosophy. In the letter that he wrote to Hawthorne after his friend praised Moby-Dick, Melville exclaimed, “Once you hugged the ugly Socrates because you saw the flame in the mouth, and heard the rushing of the demon,--the familiar,--and recognized the sound; for you have heard it in your own solitudes” (142). As Merton Sealts explains, in this letter Melville echoes Alcibiades’s comment in the Symposium that Socrates’s appearance is deceptive, since he looks like a satyr yet demonstrates profound philosophical depth, persuasive power, and immunity to physical needs. Just as he praised Hawthorne for his Socratic ability to see past surfaces to deeper truths, so Melville hoped to join the “corps of thought-divers” (Correspondence 121). By transforming the bearer of Truth into a fetcher of wine, however, the bachelors defend themselves from the ugly truth, the Tartarus that undergirds their Paradise. Wisdom has been subsumed by pleasure and consumption. Because their experiences and imaginations are so limited, the bachelors perceive reality as a fiction and cannot comprehend suffering.
The thing called pain, the bugbear styled trouble--those two legends seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations. How would men of liberal sense, ripe scholarship in the world, and capacious philosophical and convivial understanding-- how could they suffer themselves to be imposed upon by such monkish fables? Pain! Trouble! As well talk of Catholic miracles. No such thing.--Pass the sherry, sir. (322)
By referring to “bachelor imaginations,” Melville reveals both the men’s lack of contact with the real and the moral emptiness of bachelorhood, since the “bachelor” is often seen as foolish, enervated, and detached. As he quotes their huffy phrases, Melville parodies the effusive table talk and self-satisfied rhetoric of scholars who view everything as myth to be analyzed.
Slyly, Melville criticizes the bachelors for their limited imaginations, their complicity in oppression, and their impotence. Synthesizing his experiences at the Paradise of Bachelors, the narrator exclaims, “Ah! when I bethink me of the sweet hours there passed...my heart only finds due utterance through poetry; and, with a sigh, I softly sing, 'Carry me back to old Virginny!’” (319). By citing a sentimental American verse performed in blackface revues, Melville mocks the peace of the Temple as a genteel, nostalgic smugness more aligned with the hypocritical tones of Southern aristocracy’s attitude toward slavery than with true depths of feeling. “Virginny,” of course, calls to mind virginity, as the paradise of the “Brethren of the Order of Celibacy” is associated with a sterility of experience (319).[10]
Against the hedonism of the British lawyers and men-of-letters, Melville sets the misery of the mill girls working in a dreary New England factory. Composing an allegory of heaven and hell, Melville contrasts the “cool, deep glen” of the Temple with the freezing, dark hollow of Devil’s Dungeon, where the Tartarus of Maids is located (317). Near the Dungeon stands a paper mill, which presents itself as a place of death and deception “like some whited sepulchre” (324). By setting up a parallel between Tartarus and Paradise, Melville associates both with death, alludes to the Greek myth of the fallen Titans, and suggests that the bachelors themselves resemble the smug Pharisees. “The inverted similitude”—the whiteness of the Tartarus versus the darkness of the Paradise, the frozen walkways of the factory versus the lush gardens of the Temple—reinforces the connections between the two (Piazza 327), as Tartarus is “the same world seen from another angle” (Dillingham 185-86).
Only two males work in the paper factory: the “Bach,” a ruddy bachelor who enjoys presiding over the maidens, and “Cupid,” “a dimpled, red-cheeked, spirited-looking, forward little fellow,” mobile and active as opposed to the “passive-looking girls” (Piazza 329). By making the Bach (which refers to the shortened form of “bachelor,” not the composer) the boss of the factory, Melville links the privileges of the bachelors of Paradise to the suffering of the workers in Tartarus. Like the servant Socrates, this Cupid is ironically named. The narrator laments the “strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy,” who has become so much a part of the industrial system that he unconsciously practices cruelty (331). Cupid’s transformation into a factory overseer and his greed (or “cupidity”) hint at a central theme of “Tartarus,” the destruction of Eros through capitalism and a naïve idealism that denies the body and experience.
In this New England paper mill, maids make paper out of the cast-off shirts of British bachelors, establishing a direct connection between Tartarus and Paradise. As Michael Paul Rogin shows, Melville, whose father was an importer of clothes, shared with Carlyle an interest in the symbolic value of clothing, but Melville focuses on what happens to them after they are discarded. While Carlyle suggests that clothes represent authority and the past, Melville imagines the discarded clothes of the bachelors being torn apart to make a new identity. Upon seeing a pile of rags used as the raw materials for paper making, the narrator observes, “’Tis not unlikely, then.... that among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors. But the buttons are all dropped off. Pray, my lad, do you ever find any bachelor’s buttons hereabouts?” (330). By casting off their shirts, the bachelors participate in cultural recycling: female workers produce paper from the rags of British men-of-letters, bringing profits to the bachelor factory owner and providing paper for the scholars. The shirts illustrate the interconnections between the genteel, labor-free economy of the privileged bachelors and the inhumane labor of the maids. In papermaking, both the workers and the raw materials are the cast-offs of bachelors. When the narrator asks about bachelors’ buttons, Cupid believes that he is referring to flowers and asserts that “[t]he Devil’s Dungeon is no place for flowers” (330). In Flora’s Interpreter, or The American Book of Flowers and Sentiments (1832), her treatise on the meaning of flowers, Sarah Josepha Hale claims that bachelor’s buttons symbolize hope in love, a hope that is thwarted in Tartarus, where erotic forces serve the machine. Melville reinforces the notion that paper-making—the machinery of publishing as well as the production of human selves—is opposed to organic growth; indeed, it is a force of death, as the maidens become like grim reapers “whetting the very swords that slay them” (330).
One of Melville’s sources for “Tartarus” may have been C.T. Hinckley’s “The Manufacture of Paper,” which was published in Godey’s Ladies’ Book in April of 1854, two months before Melville submitted his paper-making allegory to Harpers. Comparing Melville’s story to Hinckley’s essay about the history, process, and cultural significance of paper-making illuminates how Melville transformed a description of an industrial process into a complex meditation on social obligation, gender, and creativity.[11] In Tartarus, women participate in all stages of the paper-making process, while Hinckley’s article describes men performing the finishing work and handcrafting the paper. Just as Hinckley insists that the finest rags come from the most civilized countries, so Melville imagines the rags of the bachelors as the raw material for paper making, parodying this assumption of cultural superiority. Hinckley praises the efficiency of making paper by machine, claiming that it reduces the time required from 3 weeks to 3 minutes and produces superior paper (206). In contrast, Melville presents the manufacturing process as a mock miracle of birth in which a slip of paper is re-constituted into pulp and falls nine minutes later “an unfolded sheet of perfect foolscap” (332). As critics have observed, Melville develops a conception and birth metaphor throughout the story, describing ejaculation, as a white substance “pours from both vats into that one common channel yonder”; germination, as the “germinous particles” are grown in “a strange, blood-like abdominal heat”; and gestation, as pulp undergoes as series of transformations until it resembles paper (331). Hence an industrial process becomes a metaphor (and surrogate) for human reproduction, as the factory produces not only the raw material of authorship, but also human selves.
Satirizing the rhetoric of character making, Melville imagines that the paper factory stamps its own emptiness on the female workers: “At rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper” (328). The repetition of “blank” adds to the absurdity and emptiness of the scene. “Blank” also recalls Locke’s metaphor of the blank slate, since the mill girls lack the stamp of any character. As Karen Halttunen writes of antebellum notions of character, “Within prevailing Lockean psychology, the youth’s character was like a lump of soft wax, completely susceptible to any impressions stamped upon him” (4). By comparing the process of paper production to the process of giving birth, Melville suggests that the common character is like the average book: cheap and unoriginal. As Cupid says, “foolscap being in chief demand, we turn out foolscap most,” referring not only to mas