“Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” (first published 1853)
To ground our discussion of Melville, we focused our discussion under three headings: Democracy, Capitalism, and Christianity. In our discussion of Capitalism, we examined the dynamics of – and presumed assumptions about – the employer-employee relationship in the growing industrial metropolis of the mid-nineteenth century. It is capital – and the desire to be near wealth and to gain it – that inspires the Lawyer in “Bartleby, the Scrivener.”
The Lawyer’s behaviors are determined by his attitudes towards the operations of business and the assumptions behind what employees are “supposed” to do when an assignment is given them by their employer. Within the context of the workplace, many of the assumptions regarding the implicit freedoms of American Democracy are restricted, or subsumed beneath the demands of capital within the workplace. So, what freedoms does the Lawyer allow his recalcitrant Bartleby? What freedoms does Bartleby assume he has and always has, within the workplace and beyond it?
What role does Christianity play in the story? Recall our attention to the Lawyer’s attempt to go to church one Sunday. Read the attempted church visit against the Lawyer’s attitude about Bartleby when he stops in at his office. Do we learn that Christianity and capital – the struggle to gain it, the difficulty of not having it – are incompatible – for the Lawyer at least? Why?
I also drew information from Liane Norman’s article “Barlteby and the Reader,” published in the New England Quarterly in 1971. The following is information drawn from, or inspired by, her essay.
• The reader sympathizes with the Lawyer, who represents the “laizzes-faire, Christian, and democratic code of value” (23).
• Bartleby as the person with “no contribution to make.”
• Bartleby as powerful or powerless. What does his power enable? (Norman: his power enables the story to progress).He disrupts the “commonly agreed-upon pursuits and assumptions of the community” (23).
• A man must be dealt with not because of his value, but because he exists (24).
• “Bartleby represents resistance” (25). The Lawyer as a commonplace, unimaginative man (26).
• Unlike the other employees, with their small idiosyncrasies, Bartleby has none “his deviance from the Lawyer’s expectation is a fundamental one” (27). “The Lawyer is shocked, as the reader is, to have Bartleby refuse to do his bidding. Bartleby has chosen to assert his freedom to decline” (28).
• The Lawyer seeks to “lay up” in his soul a “sweet morsel” for his conscience for being kind to Bartleby.
• Upon recognizing Barlteby’s poverty and snooping into his desk, the Lawyer proclaims that “Somehow, the things I had seen disqualified me for the time from church-going.” The Lawyer understands charity but not equality, in the sense of the true Christian obligation (first part from Norman, 33).
• The Lawyer’s assumptions are “everyman’s”: an assumption of absulote freedom concurrent with an expectation of “cooperative subordination to a commercial venture” (34).
• Discrepancies between American ideals and practice.
Another, more recent, scholarly text to consider “Bartleby, the Scrivener” in the essay “Melville’s Doctrine of Assumptions: The Hidden Ideology of Capitalist Production in ‘Bartleby,’” by David Kuebrich, published in the New England Quarterly in 1996. The following ideas are drawn from, or are inspired by, his essay:
• Panic of 1837. Labor upswing in the 1850s. Critical historical information to comprehending nuances of text.
• Kuebrich writes of the “efforts of workers to gain economic and political power” and the “dramatic labor agitation of the 1850s” (382).
• “Bartleby” as a “rich, creative synergy” . . . “a stunning original analysis of employer- employee relations” (383).
• Dramatic changes in New York City – in terms of population, employment conditions, “hurried pressures,” anonymity. Sharp class divisions. Physical barriers.
• Impact of physical space. Material conditions of workers.
Ambrose Bierce:
b. 1842-1914
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Describe style of first paragraph of “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge,” which contains a description of the sentinel at one end of the
platform, with his carriage of body “formal and unnatural.” What tone does this set for the story? We described the stylistic features of
this paragraph extensively. We
recognized the expansion and compression of time, the distant and solemn tone,
the lack of embellishment. What
else?
Consider Bierce’s references to military etiquette. What is the purpose of these references?
Bierce writes, “Death is a dignitary who when he comes
announced is to be received with formal manifestations of respect.” Discuss Bierce’s somewhat odd
description of the civilian man to be hanged: “The man who was engaged in being
hanged was apparently about thirty-five years of age.” Bierce provides a clearer
characterization of the man to be hanged than he does of the military men. What do we learn about the man to be
hanged? What does he look like? Describe his family. What is his disposition as he stands on
the railway plant?
Significant is the description of the ticking of the
condemned man’s watch. What do we
suspect it might be before Bierce reveals that the sound is the ticking of the
watch? And, importantly, where is
the bridge on which Peyton Farquhar stands?
Does the reader’s attitude about Farquhar change soon after
the beginning of Part Two?
Upon the conclusion of the story, once we learn of Faquhar’s
death, as he swings beneath Owl Creek Bridge, what do we make of his
journey? How does time elapse in
Bierce’s story? Does the ticking
of the watch, as Farquhar stands atop the bridge, presage the abstraction of
temporality later in the narrative?
Describe the scout’s entrapment of Farquhar. Isolated from its political context,
who does the reader sympathize with?
What changes for us as readers when we do consider the political context
of the planter’s execution?
Two articles that I am providing for you on our WebCT site are “Anatomy of a Classic,” by Daniel E. Samide
(published in a 2005 edition of The Writer), and “The Devil and Ambrose Bierce,”
written by Jacob Silverstein, from a 2002 editions of Harper’s magazine. Please note that these essays are
more “popular” than “scholarly,” but nonetheless provide some useful information
for you.