Choose one or two characters from either Nathaniel Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown” or Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” and discuss the ways in which each experiences conflict (either with self, other characters, or with the social and/or physical environment); the ways in which each attempts to deal with it, and the relative success or failure of each. Who receives your deepest sympathy? Why? Include direct quotes from the primary sources for analysis and support.
HERMAN MELVILLE (1819-1891)
Reputation: Romantic Prose Writer of the Sea. Nicknamed "the man who lived among cannibals"
• Age 11: Collapse of Father's business
• Age 13: Death of Father / Withdrawal from school
• Age 19: Merchant seaman & experiences at sea
• Age 21: Began voyages on whalers
Says life aboard ship (on sea) was "his Harvard and his Yale."
Fictionalized his sea-going adventures: Novels therefore are autobiographical.
• Typee (1846): Life among cannibals in Taipi Valley
• Omoo (1847): Wanderings in South Sea
• Mardi (1849): Fanciful use of other South Sea experiences
• Redburn (1850): Fictionalizes his first voyage
• White-Jacket (1850): Fictionalizes his life in the Navy
• Moby-Dick (1851): Thematizes a whaling voyage
Short Fiction: The Piazza Tales (1856): The only collection that appeared during Melville’s lifetime; contains his two best tales: “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno.” However, a "Melville Revival" occurred in 1920's and 1930's when he became popular because his works appealed to most people.
Basis of Melville's Appeal to Modern Age:
• Subject matter: mingling actuality/reality and imagined and profound moral
• Fascinating Settings
• Use of allegorical, symbolic, moral, and philosophical characters
• Pessimism
• Morbidity (of the mind: sickly, weird behavior)
• Demonism (making characters into or like demons)
• Dangers of isolation
"Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Gist
Bartleby is a strange/weird young man who takes employment in a lawyer's office copying documents (scrivener). The relationship between the two is initially satisfactory until Bartleby refuses to copy any more, giving as his only reason the fact that he "prefers not to." Consequently, what had begun as a normal relationship results in chaos and Bartleby's death.
Various Interpretation Given "Bartleby the Scrivener"
• "Bartleby" as a tragedy: shows that try as you will, you cannot cut yourself off from society, and to persist otherwise can only destroy the individual.
• Study of schizophrenia.
• Story of the ultimate difficulty human beings have in reaching each other.
• Story of two men, one who will not communicate with the world and one who will not communicate with himself.
• The dehumanizing effect of American capitalism and its supporting legal system that turn individuals into submissive wage-slaves and/or destroy them by indifference and misunderstanding.
• Insights into why people commit suicide.
• Autobiographical: Bartleby is Melville.
Note: This autobiographical approach is the most common interpretation of "Bartley, the Scrivener," arguing that the story is best understood as an allegory of Melville's own life. This "Melville-is-Bartleby" gives the following comparisons:
• Melville was also given to long brooding silences
• "prudent" men could not understand the author Herman Melville
• He once attempted to become a scrivener
• Portrayed people Melville knew, among them scriveners and mental patients
• Melville was himself supported by lawyers, including the following:
- His brothers Allan and Gansevoort
- His father-in-law, Lemuel Shaw, chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts--.
• Melville, like Bartleby, refused to submit to the demands of the conventional reading public.
• The "dead letters' of the story are equated with Melville's own rejected manuscripts / failed novels
• Bartleby's withdrawal is equated with Melville's "withdrawal" from society
Concluding Thoughts and Questions
Is such an explanation sufficient for the story? Can it be used to explain all, or even most, of the main aspects of the story? Does it explain, for example, the narrator's strange fascination with Bartleby? Or Bartleby's rejection of the narrator's help? Explain your answer fully.
• Who is the central figure in "Bartleby, the Scrivener"? Is it Bartleby himself or the lawyer narrator? Who provides the form of the story? About whom is most revealed?
• Analyze the first sentence of "Bartleby, the Scrivener." Analyze the first three paragraphs. Describe the character of the narrator as it emerges in the beginning of the story.
• Is the narrator of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" a weak man? A man of sentimental reasonableness"? Thickheaded? An exploiting capitalist?
• The narrator of "Bartleby, the Scrivener" is a timid man who honors Cicero the bold orator; the narrator is also a prudent, methodical man who admires the imprudent, irrational Bartleby. What other things and persons does the narrator admire or tolerate? What do they reveal about his character?
• The lawyer narrator is attracted to Bartleby. Is it genuine sympathy? Or does the lawyer see in Bartleby qualities of individualism and self-assurance that he himself lacks?
• Discuss the significance of the phrase or refrain "I prefer not to"?