A Cultural Context for "Bartleby the Scrivener"

To begin with, consider this  poem by Emily Dickinson, written in 1861, eight years after Melville’s story was published.  Although the poem is not directly  related to Melville’s story, you may find that it throws a certain slant of light on the character of Bartleby, on the despair he seems to be feeling.

It's the "angle of light" that seems oppressive here—the low, depressed way of seeing, feeling, understanding.  The speaker is observing how in such winter light we look at things in a depressed way, and this depression hurts us to our very soul; it's a spiritual hurt, because it's a loss of meaning, a loss of purpose.  There's no visible scar; everything is internal, invisible.  We carry it inside, tucked away.  And nothing may "teach it"—there seems to be no cure, no hope for healing this kind of hurt.  It's a deadly kind of despair.  I find this poem highly resonant with Bartleby's character. 

*

Like many reviewers had begun to do, Fitz-James O’Brien in 1853 ripped into Herman Melville and his newest novel Pierre.  Ironically, the same magazine that ran O’Brien’s slashing review (excerpted below) had no qualms publishing Melville’s short story “Bartleby the Scrivener” later that year (in its Nov./Dec. issue).

The exerpt of O’Brien’s review from PUTNAM’S that follows should provide some context for understanding the status of Melville’s reputation by the time he published “Bartleby the Scrivener.”  Just previous to this excerpt, O’Brien has poured out in great rivers his most lavish praise for Melville’s earlier work, the South Pacific adventure novels.  It's only when he turns to Melville’s more recent work, particularly his latest novel, Pierre, that the tone of his review changes sharply. 

Readers may want to consider the effect of this kind of scathing criticism on a writer who has just finished a literary masterpiece for the ages (Moby Dick).  Was the effect to produce "Bartleby the Scrivener"?  Might this critic have said much the same thing about "Bartleby"?  (What did the critics say about "Bartleby"?)  Granted those questions might require a bit of research, but it would be an interesting quest.  Readers can also puzzle, without need of outside research, how to characterize Melville's style, his characters, and the story's "moral." 

[Quotations that follow within my remarks below are from an excellent scholarly book that is also very readable, Beneath the American Renaissance by David Reynolds, published by Havard University Press in 1988. Reynolds studies several well-known 19th century American writers and their relation to the popular culture of their day. I apologize for the roughness of these notes; I hope they shed some light anyway.]

Melville was fascinated by the “sensational literature” of his day. In many ways, he was caught up in the great stream of popular literature that flooded American city streets in the wake of the advent of the penny presses, which churned out cheap papers and pamphlets exploiting the public taste for criminal, erotic, and demonic stories. By the end of the 1850s, sensational literature had been so ubiquitous that one writer wearily observed how “No narrative of human depravity or crime can shock or horrify an American reader” (Reynolds). Any attempts to upbraid the perpetrators of these penny papers and presses, to moralize them into submission, just popularized them all the more, as readers flocked to see what all the fuss was about. Apparently the American appetite for stories of crime, adventure, broken taboos, horror, gore, murder, incest, all manner of perversity, was practically insatiable. The more shocking the better.

Many of those whom we consider our great 19th century writers—Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, to name three who worked in the short story genre—were swept up in this popular sensationalist literature, deeply immersed in it. They came out of it in their own ways. Poe would mine those penny papers for story ideas, and they provided the genesis for many of his so-called “horror” and crime stories. Hawthorne, according to his son, was “pathetically addicted” to the crime pamphlets that circulated widely in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s. When Hawthorne was in Liverpool, as an American consul, he had bundles of these papers shipped over to him. He just couldn’t be without them. And Melville also was affected in his own way, as we’ll see.

One of the more popular stereotypes that arose out the mire of this sensational literature was the “likable criminal” or the “justified pariah.” The Billy the Kids were as popular then as they are now. We’re still intrigued by the rugged lawlessness of this outsider who breaks the laws, and makes the laws seem unjust. Bob Dylan expressed (and embodied) the same idea in the sixties when he wrote in one song, “to live outside the law, you must be honest.” And that’s exactly what Melville’s characters came to be, those paradoxically noble ne’er-do-wells. They were one clear debt he owed to the sensational materials he kept his eye trained on. The likable criminal or the justified pariah was the only character with force enough to fully confront the powerful, but deeply entrenched forces robbing the rest of us blind.

But those forces would never give up without a fight. An interesting and popular counterforce to America’s street fascination with these dark, ambiguous heroes (and with the radical democrats in general) emerged in New York literary circles and were broadly represented by the "Young America" movement. Writers in this movement were characterized by their ability to don a comfortable conventionality, to achieve a smoothness, genteelness, a polish that would play well “across the water.” All the darker elements, the troublesome moral ambiguities that had bubbled up from the streets, were expelled. It was this “sanitized” literature that Melville deeply hated and which he satirized in his largely misunderstood novel Pierre.  Melville found the elitist but bland, sterile conventionality that pervaded the (influential) Young America movement distasteful. He felt that the image of America it portrayed was false to the bone.  It was willfully blind to the paradoxes of idealism and violence that was the true pulse of life in America. As David Reynolds explains, he felt that “to be a fully American democrat, one with a realistic vision of the world, was to be a justified pariah, a rebel against what seemed a corrupt society." The wealthy, aristocratic classes, hiding their hypocrisy and greed behind a veil of false gentility and feeding off the rest of us from their seats of power, would only be exposed, could only be defeated, by the paradoxically likable outlaw. Moby Dick, Melville’s masterpiece, is a complex blend of just such paradoxical characters--the humane cannibal, the inspiringly robust but monomaniacal captain out for revenge, the good but ineffectual Starbuck, the terrifying force of the whale itself. (But in addition to its thematic complexity, Moby Dick was a full seventy years ahead of its time stylistically, and although some critics reviewed it favorably, it never found a reading audience until the modernists rescued it in the 1920s. At that time Meliville was recognized as one of their own.)

“Bartleby the Scrivener,” like a lot of Melville’s fiction, came streaming from the same literary spring that gushed out much of the sensationalist literature of his day. There was one novel in particular that seems to have been extremely influential. George Foster, in 1849, wrote a novel called New York Slices that essentially “exposed Wall Street as a totally dehumanizing environment producing puppet-like people and universal misery cloaked by gentility” (Reynolds). It contained a “pale young man” (every office had one, Foster wrote) who lived daily with the understanding that he might suffer the loss of everything at a moment’s notice. These pale young men were slashing their wrists all across New York, the novel suggested. Also in Foster’s novel: a scene to describe the Tombs (a New York prison), a place that epitomized the very bottom of the pit, the very worst depravity a man might fall into; another scene where Broadway appears alive at noon, but deserted and dead in the gray early morning light; and yet another scene in which the city’s pawn shops appear as repositories for possessions of the dead or people who’ve fallen into poverty. “Bartleby the Scrivener” appears to be a literary version of a similar kind of tale, and it borrows heavily from many of Foster’s central images. The difference in Melville’s story is his literary skill, his inventiveness—the form he gave to his material—his “skillful invention of the flawed narrator, the symbolism of the setting and the imagery of the “walls,” the psychological and metaphysical richness of the characters” (Reynolds). But there’s definitely a debt to George Foster, a friendly fellowship in purpose and theme, and the parallels between the tales abound.

Bartleby can be seen as a kind of “likable pariah” (I say that and duck!) in as much as he evokes sympathy, but he's a pariah embalmed with genteel  smoothness, embodying the utterly good manners of conventional society. There’s nothing “dirty” or unpleasant or violent or the least bit sinister about him. He’s a thoroughly conventional young man, albeit pallid and even “cadaverous,” a kind of ghostly walking dead. You can feel Melville’s satiric hand, his vindictiveness against that kind of empty display in the way he draws Bartleby’s character. The man literally sinks into his death, curled up on the grass at the Tombs, with utter decorum and gentlemanliness—never a harsh word, no mess, no gore, no popular American sensationalism to it at all. He just dies ever so passively, ever so politely, passing into the next world leaving no blood on anyone’s hands. While we get to know him, he’s the “pale young man” (a cadaver, in Melville’s hands) who along the way to conventional “success” loses his sense of the meaning of it all, who succumbs in puppet-like fashion and with mechanical regularity to his own despair. Bartleby seems almost inhuman himself, and perhaps Melville means him be. Turkey and Nippers, although we may identify with them more easily, are no less mechanistic than Bartleby in the regularity, the predictability of their responses. With clockwork precision they “complement” one another’s shifting moods, performing their tasks in equally servile, puppet-like fashion. The office where everyone works itself seems more like a cage than a human habitation—shouldn’t a work place be habitable? (maybe not)—with its walls in every window, its lone shaft of light from above. Bartleby, poor man, upon arrival is placed in a cage within a cage—his rebellion, a pitiful joke. There is no rebellion. There is no one listening. There is only the interminable self-interest of the powerful.

On the one hand readers may feel something for Bartleby. His utter despair seems real, as real as the “heavenly hurt” in Dickinson’s poem. His death, his life seems pathetic, and he may evoke sympathy.  On the other hand, some readers may be too annoyed with Bartleby to care; they are so frustrated and repelled by his sickly rebellion that they're almost glad to see him go.  Where is the author's feeling for Bartleby in all of this?  Well hidden, to be sure.  Masterfully hidden.

Further Reading
Read Melville's works, or about Melville's works, at The Life and Works of Herman Melville, a website "dedicated to disseminating information about Herman Melville on the Internet and the World Wide Web."