John Trautwein
Dr. Kleinman
English 1B Sec. 832
4-24-11
Melville’s Middle Path
In his short story Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville beautifully weaves a contrasting narrative of the moral poles of materialism – as exemplified by the narrator – versus idealism – as personified by Bartleby. Melville’s sets up a world where Bartleby’s spirit of idealism in is constant conflict with material pace of Wall Street.
It is in this injection however, where Melville’s truth – a simple rejection from any fantastical extremes – can best be realized. In this staunch abyss between the dualism inherent throughout not only the mid 19th century but our entire post renaissance epoch we find the true value of Melville’s soul and his indication that something higher exists outside the confines of any ism.
As literature critic Christopher W. Sten expounds, Bartleby is “not only a story of the transcendentalist” – for Melville, unlike his contemporaries Emerson and Thoreau, was no transcendentalist – he was a realist at best although claims can be made to his likeness to determinism (Sten 30). Melville begins the story however, describing the aristocratic, material and rather inconspicuously mundane life of the narrator, the lawyer who does a “snug business among rich men’s bonds”(Melville 20). This image of materialism, in all its shallow truths, is what Melville seeks to paint with his contextual background of the narrator’s life. As Sten points out, the narrator is a “man who defines life in terms of ‘experience’ and thinks from the ‘data of the senses’” – thus someone engrossed in the sensual and material world. Then enters Bartleby, a poor scrivener hired by the narrator despite his foreshadowing remark of Bartleby possessing an “innate and incurable disorder.” (Melville 21). Bartleby’s character grows to conflict with and thus serve as the idealist counterpart to the materialist narrator. Bartleby’s radically opposed perception of true value in life highlights the apparent freedom the narrator lacks in abiding to or even sensing the calls of his spirit. Bartleby’s passive protests to the requests of narrator with his famed “I would prefer not to” (24), “is apparently Melville’s rendering of the idealist’s refusal to act in complicity with the monotonous and spiritually bankrupt world of the materialist.” (Sten 32). However, Bartleby (and his idealism) is no more a heroic than the Narrator is villainous and in the end Bartleby’s idealism leads him to a deadly demise from reality that cannot thrive on just ideals.
Bartleby’s gradual withdrawal from the “necessities of life” and his inactive spiral into death mark Melville’s complementary critique to the rogue idealism, a trend as prevalent as the vain materialism which Melville equally despised. Melville’s literature was marked by his “inclination to spin tales which condemned American idealists.” (Sten 34). Although Bartleby possesses a spirit that the materialist narrator lacks, “spiritual ripeness is all, the scrivener thinks, so he mentally wastes away.” (Sten 33). The statement Melville’s makes is that despite a certain freedom away from material addictions with his assertions of “I would prefer not to” Bartelby’s “freedom to do as he pleases is obviously quite limited” as he “suffers from his futile attempt to act in accordance with his preferences”(Patrick 42).
Thus Melville’s critique expounds the view that Bartleby is no more free than the narrator, indicating that an extreme rebuttal to the horrors of material capitalism only serves a different egoist attempt at self-righteousness. Dennis Perry is in his literary analysis of Bartleby claims that “all the major characters vainly attempt to use ego defense mechanisms to reduce the anxiety produced by the sterile activity of the law office” (408). Thus, Bartleby “recreates himself in the same egoist image of wall street” and with his pathetic death, he is elucidated as the another one-dimensional hero, whose virtue falls short in the face of deeper conflict.
If neither the Bartleby nor the narrator, with all of their contrast, serve as heroes who would represent some greater moral message, what then is the underlying theme that Melville’s weaves into the story? On the surface it seems that the story is merely an attempt to prove that neither prevailing attitude in the mid 19th century, whether materialism or ideal existentialism, is founded on any truth that serves something more than the ego. However, perhaps Melville’s genius lies the characters’ conflict itself. Melville, like the transcendentalists of his day, recognized man’s inherent spiritual poverty, however he attempted to “make sense and give meaning to that poverty by creating the kinds of fictions – extra literary as well as literary – which might satisfy man’s double nature” (Sten 43). Thus, the Melville’s message is that man inherently possesses this double nature – of both the material and the ideal – and that neither can succeed alone, rather each “must continually strive to come together with its opposite” (ibid). In the conflict amongst Bartleby and the narrator, Melville shows how these two sides of man can be reconciled; each must “seek to communicate by testing the idea and the world against each other” (ibid). This reconciliation of the man’s dual nature and the story’s denouement occurs in the last moments where the narrator – at the discovery of Bartleby’s death – sighs with a distraught compassion and grieves ‘ah Bartleby, ah humanity.” The narrator, the materialist, at the death of his other, finally realizes something larger than himself, and if but for only a moment, his ego dissolves – showing us upon what horizon Melville was to go.
Our modern day Bartleby?
Works Cited
Melville, Herman. “Bartleby, The Scrivener.” Literature A Portable Anthology. Ed. Janet E. Gardener, Beverly Lawn, Jack Ridl, and Peter Schakel. Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009. 20-50. Print.
Perry, Dennis. “’Ah, Humanity’: Compulsion Nueroses in Melville’s Bartelby.” Studies in Short Fiction (1987). EBSCOhost. Web. 20 Apr. 2011.
Sten, Christopher W. “Bartleby the Transcendentalists Dead Letter to Emerson.” Modern Language Quartely 35.1 (1974): 30-50. EBSCOhost. Web. 18 Apr. 2011
Walton, Patrick R. “Melville’s “Bartleby” and the Doctrine of Necessity.” American Literature 41.1 (1969): 39-43. EBSCOhost. Web. 19 Apr. 2011.
