Herman Melville Biography and Themes “Bartleby, the Scrivener” “Tartarus of Maids”

Melville Biography Timeline  1819 b. New York  1830 family bankrupt  family falls apart; H.M. drops out of school  st voyage at sea

Timeline cont.  experiences at sea=37 books about it –At first popular reading & commercial success  on ships Acushnet and Lucy Ann  1844 Typee  1847 Marries Elizabeth Shaw; Omoo –But wants to change writing, wants meaning; wants to rebel, write banned books  1849 Mardi and Redburn—failures critically and financially

Timeline cont.  1850 White Jacket; develops relationship with Nathaniel Hawthorne –Returns to “popular fiction” but hates it –Melville to Hawthorne (while working on Moby Dick): “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, all my books are botches.”

Timeline cont.  1851 Moby Dick –Topic: 800 pages about guy trying to find whale and get back at it –Not as much of failure as Mardi, but not successful; received little notice –Wants to write novels written at two different levels  Said to Hawthorne: “secret motto that few would discern”  Said about Hawthorne’s books: “are superficially calculated to deceive— egregiously deceived, the superficial skimmer of books”

Timeline cont.  Pierre, Israel Potter, trip to Europe, edits Hawthorne’s works, The Confidence Man  1867 abandons fiction –Magazine writing to make $ –Publishes short stories in Europe (including “Bartleby”) –Emotionally wrung out from failures, careful of issues of offensiveness, still trying out technique of writing for two audiences at once

Timeline cont.  Job in Custom House; sons die  1886 Inheritance  1891 H.M. dies  1920 H.M. rediscovered as an author

Themes in Hawthorne and Melville  Romantic concern with good and evil –Hawthorne: Puritan ancestry –Melville: ships  Responded differently –Hawthorne: positive –Melville: negative

The Chart: Darker Romantics **D.R. shares characteristics with other Romantics but more pessimistic view  Authors: (Hawthorne), Melville, Edgar Allan Poe  View of Man: moral struggle with evil; feelings and intuition; dark interior  View of God: good v. evil; sin and its psychological effects on people  View of Nature: evil found in setting and symbol; often the supernatural  View of Society: must be reformed

Allegory  Objects and persons equated with meanings outside of the narrative  Characters personify abstract qualities  Evokes dual interest  Religious, moral, political, personal, satiric

Themes  Power of presence of evil  No logic in society or nature; man depend on self  No dogma can teach; man learn it on own  Man must fight society and nature  Life is mask of appearance  Battles of conscience  Redemption in human love for fellow man

Themes cont.  Man=maker of own identity –must accept inability to fully know power of universe –must know own mortality –must know need for fellow man and capacity for love of humankind

Themes cont.  Man is not equal to God  Love=only element of innocence that endures  Can result in isolation or “hell”  Responsible for other human beings

“Bartleby”  Dickens quality  Some readers: about Melville’s own struggles as writer –Bartleby paid as copier (scrivener) to write what everyone else is writing— Melville’s own feelings?

Mythological Allusions in “Tartarus of Maids”  Tartarus  Greek version of hell/underworld  Bacchus (Old Bach)  God of wine; often had a harem of women called Bacchantes: “[Bacchus] was accompanied, as was his custom, by a train of women dancing and singing exultant songs, wearing fawn skins over their robes, waving ivy- wreathed wands. They seemed mad with joy.” (Edith Hamilton’s Mythology 68-9).  Cupid  “[Venus’s] son, that beautiful winged youth whom some call Cupid and others call Love, against whose arrows there is no defense” (Hamilton 122).  Actaeon  the hunter who accidentally witnessed the goddess Artemis bathing and “was changed into a stag…His dogs saw him running and chased him…They fell upon him, his own faithful hounds, and killed him” (Hamilton 374).