English 251: American Lit. (1600-1865)

INTRODUCTION + READING ASSIGNMENT + WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Assignment 28:
HERMAN MELLVILLE

First published in Putnam's magazine in 1853, "Bartleby, The Scrivener" was titled simply, "Bartleby." Reprinted in The Piazza Tales several years later, it had been given a new title; in full, it was called "Bartleby, The Scrivener; A Story of Wall Street." We may open our consideration of the tale by remarking what those changes call to attention.

A "scrivener" was a clerical employee whose job it was to make written copies of documents: in duplicate, or triplicate, or even more. Think of a scrivener, then, as a human copy machine; the work was repetitive in the most mechanical sense. No original or individuating labor was involved, or even invited. Instead the scrivener's work was evaluated solely on the basis of the speed and the accuracy by which copies of originals were generated. Accuracy was assured, as we see in Melville's tale, by proofreading jointly undertaken by the scriveners employed in a particular office. Read as an allegory of modem labor, with its reliance on mechanically reduplicative tasks, the scrivener's job is symbolic: it stands for the diminished individuality, the diminished agency of the human being in conditions of modem, factory-style labor. Anyone who has ever done repetitive tasks, especially in a factory setting, for low pay and airheaded bosses, should be able to empathize with Melville's character.

Yet Wall Street was already, by 1850, the national symbol of what strong, individual agents could supposedly do. You'll notice that the narrator of Melville's tale, an elderly lawyer, likes to drop the name of John Jacob Astor, whose death in 1848 was widely hailed as an epitome of the new captains of industry, an example of what the self-reliant individual might accomplish. Profiting from Jefferson's opening of the west by becoming the first to establish a base of trade on the Pacific coast (in 1811), Astor parlayed his fortune into a far-flung empire of mercantile, financial, and industrial interests, with offices on Wall Street. In the years before his death, Astor seemed to further prove the public good of private empire-building by turning over large sums to philanthropic causes. Astor was the first giant of Wall Street.

Melville works a kind of subversive pun, however, by taking the name Wall Street literally. In the tale we are reading, the offices are surrounded and defined by walls. Walls hem in these rooms on all sides, and virtually erase Nature (the sun and sky, for example) from anyone's view. Further compartmentalized and partitioned, the narrator's law office begins to take on the semblance of a well-ordered machine, moreso because the weird dispositions of its other two scriveners, Turkey and Nippers, complement each other like the movements of a two-cycle motor. It has functioned without a hitch, evidently; then Bartleby arrives.

What does Bartleby do? First of all Melville makes it plain that the man is a superb copyist; yet he will not join in the proofreading of his work. Apparently it's his quirk, the glitch in his mechanism. But note also the mode of his refusal. He says: "I would prefer not to." Is this an outright refusal to do the work requested of him? Not really. The grammarians among us point out, first of all, that his sentence is in the subjunctive rather than the indicative mood; he says "I would." As such Barteleby expresses not a statement of fact, but a contingent or hypothetical action or possibility. Moreover his verb of choice is "prefer," which means "to value highly, or give priority; to like better." It's a verb heavily tinged by affective content, which is to say, feelings, emotions, and desires. In stating his affective side, rather than simply putting his motor skills and mechanically cognitive abilities in the employment of a boss, Bartleby asserts the self. He does so, however, in a culture where those assertions of self simply have no place. The rest of Melville's tale, which goes on considerably further from the man's first refusal, explores the consequences of his action.

For our purposes here, let's read "Bartleby, The Scrivener" as a story in which Emerson's ideal of self-reliance is taken into the real world of bosses and boring work and monetary values. What happens to that Emersonian ideal in such a laboratory of the real?

Reading Assignment

Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener" (pp. 2330-2355).

Writing Assignment

Read carefully in the first paragraph the narrator's introduction of the tale about Bartleby. What claims does he make, what build-up of our expectations does it involve?
Next, read carefully the narrator's introduction of himself in the third paragraph. What does that introduction tell (wise) readers about him? What kind of law does he practice, and how might that be significant?
Note the narrator's frequent uses of the double-negative, as in "I was not unemployed in my profession by the late John Jacob Astor" (page 2330). Does that mean he was employed, or not? What thematic functions do the double-negatives involve?
Summarize, briefly, how the qualities of Turkey and Nippers offset each other.
The narrator says that he keeps Bartleby on as a kind of charitable or philanthropic act in order to purchase "a sweet morsel for [his] conscience." What does that begin to suggest about his motives?
Discuss the ways that Bartleby's eventual eviction, arrest, and sentence to "The Tombs" (a New York prison-house), provide a symbolic ending to the main action.
But then consider the narrator's post-script when he speculates on Bartleby's work in a "dead-letter office." How does that change your reading of the story, and its narrator?
In two or three paragraphs, discuss the ways that "Bartleby, The Scrivener" challenges Emerson's idealistic view of the strong individual, in his "Self-Reliance" essay. Specifically, what doctrines of Emerson's does Melville lay open to doubt?

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