More than two and a half thousand new magazines rolled off the printing presses in the United States in the quarter of a century after 1825. Survival rates were improving, but attrition was still high; many lasted no longer than a few issues.1 In addition to their subject matter, magazines needed distinctive physical features to stand out in such a crowded market. Rounding up the contents of quality monthlies published in April 1855, the New York Times reported, “We like the April number of the Knickerbocker perhaps most of all because the ‘Editor’s Table’ is not only capital—as it always is—but also is presented in clean type, of good Christian size.” After relating the details of an eye infection regularly induced in one of the magazine’s readers by an earlier, less satisfactory typeface, the Times article gives only five lines to the Knickerbocker’s content. Of the features in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the illustrated pieces are brought first to the reader’s attention, while nonillustrated material, or “Other papers of interest,” are subordinated to the second tier. Missing altogether from the listing for the Harper’s April issue, however, was an anonymously published short story whose plot seemed clearly to link the material form of the magazine to writers the Times considered responsible for the articles in the April issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine: “Most of these one would judge to be written by gentlemen of taste and leisure—dreamy men, who go out occasionally to see life, not who are daily in contact with life’s hard realities.”2 The missing story was Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.”
This omission looks like a failure to connect what seem obviously connected: the “dreamy men” whose writing appears in Putnam’s; the gentlemen in the first part of Melville’s story who inhabit “the quiet cloisters” of the “dreamy Paradise of Bachelors” (PT 316); and the papermaking described in the second part of the story. But making this connection relies on conjoining two material economies the Times saw no reason to conjoin: the economy of paper and the economy of print. In this chapter I follow the lead set by the Times and peel apart paper and print to argue that paper has a life before it becomes commercial print culture and that we should distinguish the paper on which writers set down their words from the paper on which commercial print culture circulates. Critics assume that Melville’s literary career is an index of the state of authorship in the mid-nineteenth-century literary marketplace because they continually mistake these two economies for one another. Paper is not only print.
The chapter proceeds with two key arguments in mind. First, I show that Melville displays a much more specific and sophisticated interest in paper, its manufacture, and its uses than critics have so far recognized. Second, I argue that “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” are better read as Melville’s engagement with the materials on which, and with which, they were written than as allegories of authorship in a mechanizing age. For Jacques Derrida, paper has a history “that is brief but complex” and from which we may now be retreating.3 Any accounting of its archive would benefit from turning to Melville’s writing, the better to understand the plain facts of paper before its journey through the cycle of publication, distribution, and circulation in a print economy.4 In broader terms, Melville’s treatment of paper suggests the limits of commercial print culture’s power over the imaginative writer. The magazine market that paid Melville did not necessarily dictate the shape, nature, and form of the writing for which it paid; in the chess game that was publishing, Melville could still make his own moves.
The print industry in which Melville was embedded thrived in the mid-nineteenth century thanks to the hardware of the machine age. Manufacturers, typesetters, and printers drummed out the rhythms of print production on the toughest materials available to them; metal and wood clattered and scraped in concert to fill marketplaces with a chorus of printed forms. Yet the material in which this industry put most faith was altogether more fragile. Today paper gives way to pixels, but in the nineteenth century no alternative existed to a medium whose preeminence technology ensured by finding new ways to make it, print on it, and circulate it. No matter that paper was susceptible to fire, water, and other forms of ill treatment; print prospered and diversified during this period because of an unflagging belief in paper’s legitimacy and inevitability. This faith extended beyond the publishing world. Both narrators in Melville’s “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” are businessmen who trust paper. The lawyer in the first story uses paper to ratify contracts and agreements; for the seedsman in the second story, paper is the best medium for safely distributing economic goods.
To the writers who supplied print content, paper did not always offer the same guarantees. Thomas Carlyle was notoriously pessimistic about the chaos he thought resulted from a proliferation of paper, both in “the paper age” leading up to the French Revolution and in his own contemporary Britain. More generally, commercial literary culture produced and distributed paper containers whose content must still navigate the vagaries of readerly consumption. The print industry can be a writer’s willing emissary, but it cannot always ensure a favorable or even a diplomatic reception. The point when a piece of print meets a reader therefore duplicates the beginning of the writing process. When others read one’s work they see what the writer sees first: that paper is a medium that does not reliably ensure the safe transmission of thought from abstract to physical form. Paper is often the incontrovertible evidence that finds a writer guilty of imperfection and failure. In the nineteenth century, an expanding print readership constantly demanding content passed harsh sentence on the convicted. In these circumstances, a writer’s interaction with paper might result in agonizing struggle, not reliable communication.
The inverted climax of Melville’s career appears to exemplify just such a struggle after the public failures of Moby-Dick and especially Pierre. “Bartleby” was the first of Melville’s magazine pieces to make it into print; in retrospect the pitiable refusenik copyist appears a symptom of Melville’s prevailing malaise and seer of his literary future. Forced to write magazine pieces because he would not or could not write the novels readers wanted, Melville was destined to a writing life after the 1850s largely without readers. What lay ahead for him was not the Tombs but the space Bartleby eventually leaves behind: the office in which Melville performed his duties for the New York customs authorities.
“Bartleby” may even represent a judgment on long-standing agonies. So palpable was Melville’s struggle to transfer his thoughts to paper from early in his writing career, Elizabeth Renker has argued, that he “chronically experienced the page as an obscuring, frustrating, resistant force against whose powers of blankness he battled as he wrote.” Marriage only exacerbated Melville’s predicament. There he found himself entangled in a fractious domestic writing environment, working alongside his wife and sisters as they copied and transcribed his work in the cramped space of Arrowhead. Renker argues that he transferred the frustration of his physical struggle to write on paper into violence against both the paper and the women, especially his wife. Paper and women are interchangeable in Melville’s work because of a “metonymic chain associating writing with misery, women with misery, and women with writing.”5 Melville’s was the grimmest of struggles.
The biographical record, however, offers little support for this line of thinking. In the fullest account of Melville’s life between the publication of Pierre and the writing of “Bartleby” in the summer of 1853, Hershel Parker cites, but does not countenance, the opinion about this period given by his wife, Elizabeth, ten years after Melville’s death. Rather than turning him into a recluse, battered by reviewers, Elizabeth claimed of the reception of Pierre: “In fact it was a subject of joke with him, declaring that it was but just, and I know that however it might have affected his literary reputation, it concerned him personally but very little.”6 Reviews of Pierre appeared first at the end of July 1852 and continued over the next few months. Almost universally bad, they were not so bad that Melville contemplated giving up writing. Instead, he immediately returned to his paper and started writing a new novel based on a true story told to him on Nantucket in July by John Clifford, the state’s attorney general and an acquaintance of Melville’s father-in-law, Judge Lemuel Shaw. This story of a shipwrecked sailor and the woman he marries and then deserts before marrying bigamously elsewhere and returning to his first wife many years later became The Isle of the Cross. Melville discussed the story with Hawthorne and thought his friend might want to work it into fictional form; after a visit to Hawthorne in Concord in December 1852, Melville decided to write the story himself and did so through the winter and spring, finishing a draft in April 1853. Whatever brickbats Melville withstood following Pierre, he clearly still had enough faith in his own talent not to think his literary life a hopeless one.
Nor does the evidence about Melville’s life during this period substantiate some of the speculative claims Parker makes about the writer’s state of mind. Melville appears only to commit a series of minor social faux pas: he failed to write to his brother Tom; he snubbed Alfred Billings Street—an acquaintance of Melville’s uncle Peter—who had read a poem at the Pittsfield Young Ladies’ Institute anniversary celebration; and, to his mother’s disappointment, Melville missed the chance to enhance his local reputation by not contributing to a book on Berkshire County edited by Geoffrey Greylock. Parker concludes, “Peter had been humiliated, Maria was exasperated: the front the family had put up was beginning to crack.” The suggestion that the “family was near hysteria” is hyperbole and says more about his family than about Melville.7
His mother’s concerns that Herman was endangering his health by writing a new novel were understandable given that she had already lost her husband and first son, Gansevoort, prematurely. Her desire to stop Melville from writing and instead secure paid work led to discussions about a foreign consulship, a situation Parker raises to the level of “crisis” by adding to his problems the secret loan Melville had taken from Tertullus Stewart and for which Arrowhead was collateral: “During all of the discussions,” Parker suggests, “the secret loan loomed large in Melville’s own mind: if he went abroad would Stewart seize Arrowhead from under the family he had left there?”8 The loan had so far not loomed large enough for Melville to keep up with payments, and how exactly Stewart would seize Arrowhead is not clear. Such action would have to be taken legally; Melville’s being abroad was no grounds for circumventing the law. And given that his wife’s family had bailed out Melville before, if the loan became public knowledge no doubt Judge Shaw would bail him out again rather than see his daughter put out on the street.
Against these problems, other events were as likely to give Melville comfort. Elizabeth gave birth to their third child; he visited friends and family in Manhattan, Boston, and New Rochelle; was himself visited by his old Acushnet shipmate Henry Hubbard; and he saw his family’s financial situation improve immeasurably on May 31, 1853, when Judge Shaw made a new will leaving Elizabeth one-fifth of his estate, writing off the money he had lent Melville as advances against this share, and turned over Elizabeth’s wedding fund of $3,000 to Benjamin Curtis for investment. Harper & Brothers rejected The Isle of the Cross in June, but Parker’s claim that in the early summer of 1853 “Melville was about as beaten as a man can be” is substantiated neither by his subsequent claim that “Melville picked himself up stoutly” rather than reacting with his “characteristic recklessness” after the rejection, nor by his claim that when he started writing magazine fiction in the summer—almost immediately after Harper rejected the new novel—“Melville achieved a remarkable amount of intermittent work, relishing the new literary form which allowed him to throw his energies into a piece for a few days then put it behind him.”9 Somehow, and it is not clear how, the beaten man resurrected himself.
Biography can be correct in fact and still wrong in spirit. What, in retrospect, looks like lurching between fair skies and storms might have been experienced as the steady buffeting of life’s minor headwinds. Melville’s literary reputation was certainly depleted after Pierre, but he remained a substantial enough figure for Putnam’s to devote an essay to him in the magazine’s second issue of February 1853. Fitz-James O’Brien quotes in admiration long passages from Omoo and White-Jacket. While conceding that Melville “totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble,” he concludes that Melville may yet “make a notch on the American pine.”10 But imagine that a distance lies between what others want to make of you as a writer and what one wants to make of oneself. Imagine that Melville’s wife was right and that the fate of Pierre concerned her husband “personally but very little”; that instead of falling over the precipice because of his stubborn refusal to change direction, Melville turned and took another path leading him away from the dangers of fame; that he continued to write—magazine fiction, The Confidence-Man, poetry, Billy Budd—for reasons other than making his “notch.”
Melville’s magazine writing tells a different story about his paper life. Paper was already a source of pleasure for Melville before he wrote for Harper’s and Putnam’s. He liked it well enough that he could boast to Duyckinck about living in a neighborhood renowned for papermaking; he considered paper a suitable object for gifts he gave his family; and he sought out the finest paper on which to reply to Sophia Hawthorne after she wrote him praising parts of Moby-Dick (C 218). To be sure, writers struggle. But struggle was not a condition of Melville’s being; it was an occupational hazard shared by all writers and by many other tradespeople and professionals who translated between abstract and material realms. A writer tries to match thought to writing in the same way an engineer tries to perfect a papermaking machine from a set of drawings, or a bookkeeper tries to match a set of accounts to a publisher’s trading activity. Neither side in these scenarios easily corresponds to the other; the very nature of the job is to effect a compromise, and compromises are rarely perfect. Frustration is the everyday consciousness of work that engineers, accountants, and writers soon learn to live with. What one also accumulates in the course of this everyday activity is an understanding and respect for the materials of one’s trade, including their strengths and limitations; these are the materials one does not give up on out of frustration but to which one keeps returning, day after day. Materials are friends and colleagues to a writer, not enemies. Paper is the site where writers imagine, create, and—however imperfectly—overcome their struggles. An embedded author like Melville is one in whose writing echo the labors of working with paper.
Writing about paper in his magazine stories, Melville shows himself a generous and thoughtful custodian of the material that had withstood the clanging and whirring metallic rollers, presses, and cutters to arrive on his desk and in his hands. The composure, articulacy, and curiosity of his narrators in “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” are examples of subtle creativity rather than frustration and struggle. Rather than symptoms of Melville’s supposedly abject writing life, both participate in a dialogue with the economy of paper and their own material production more audibly than they speak the agonies of the economy of print. His trip to Dalton shows that Melville took paper seriously in its own right. The intention here is not to silence Melville’s wider commentary but rather to press one’s ear closely to the page—to listen more carefully to the writing amid the hubbub of the loud and noisy print culture of the machine age. The art of listening is sometimes to want no more of stories than what the stories themselves first want to achieve; heightening the stakes of interpretation does not necessarily heighten the returns.
Exactly which mill Melville visited on his family outing to Dalton has been the source of some confusion. Harrison Elliott first pointed to the Defiance Mill, but although David Carson did build this mill with Joseph Chamberlin in 1823, sole ownership passed to Henry Chamberlin in 1840.11 Jay Leyda, followed by Marvin Fisher, Philip Young, and later Hershel Parker, identified the Old Red Mill as Melville’s destination.12 Once again, although Carson had been connected to this mill since its origin in 1809, he quickly sold his interest to Zenas Crane, who became sole owner of the mill in 1826. By the time Melville visited in 1851, Crane’s sons owned and ran the Old Red Mill. The only mill in Dalton to which Carson was connected by 1851 was the Old Berkshire Mill, which had passed into the hands of his sons following his retirement in 1849.13 From the descriptions of the paper made at the mill in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” the paper historian A. J. Valente concludes that “the most likely possibility would be the Berkshire Mill in Dalton.”14 By the time Melville wrote the story, Carson had moved to Pittsfield, where he became president of Pittsfield Bank when it was chartered in 1853, a position he maintained until his death in 1858.
There is no evidence that Melville had any financial dealings with Carson, but we do know from a letter Augusta Melville sent to her sister Helen in December 1850 that the town of Lee and not Dalton was originally planned as the destination for the “expedition . . . to get a supply of paper at the manufactory.”15 Outside of Dalton, Berkshire County more generally was an important paper-producing area of the country and by 1857 housed a total of forty-three mills. Lee, a dozen miles south of Pittsfield, produced more paper than any other town in the United States in 1840.16 What distinguished the mills in Lee was their production of lower-quality paper, which was sold for the purpose of printing books and newspapers, including two of the largest circulating in the 1840s: Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune and James Gordon Bennett’s New York Herald. The demand for paper of this kind fueled a mill-building boom in Lee in the 1830s and 1840s. The mills in Dalton, while also increasingly servicing the New York City market, produced the higher-quality cut, ruled, and stamped paper for the purposes Melville lists in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” Although Cupid, who guides the narrator through the factory, makes a distinction between the foolscap being manufactured by the machine at the time of the narrator’s visit and the “cream-laid and royal sheets” that represent, he says, their “finer work” (PT 333), the stationery being produced in the mill was still of much finer quality than that produced elsewhere. It was the paper Melville gave as gifts to his family after visiting Dalton in January 1851.
Why the destination of Melville’s family outing changed from Lee to Dalton is not a matter of record. The fact that Melville had a choice, however, and that he opted for the fine paper of Dalton, embeds him in the contingencies of the local economies of paper that were facilitating the expansion of print more generally, but of which books, periodicals, and newspapers were only one part. The distinction between papermaking districts indicates the kind of concentration and specialization one would expect to find in a maturing papermaking industry, but it also demands a reassessment of Melville’s interest in and attitude toward the paper economy. As Christina Lupton writes, “The more simply we think of ourselves returning to the page, the more assuredly we lay the grounds for new theoretical ventures by which to find, in our simplest references to paper, new proof that it was never simply there.”17 The contingencies of a paper economy offer a way of revisiting “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” in order to focus attention on the plain facts of paper and papermaking in the story.
The means by which paper was “never simply there” were more apparent than ever as increased demand saw the introduction of new technologies at the beginning of the nineteenth century. For Kevin McLaughlin, the mechanized production of paper after the eighteenth century created an ideological paradox. While paper was increasingly the means for the dissemination of knowledge and information, it was also a medium marked by ephemerality, given that the chemical additives used in modern manufacturing hastened paper’s decomposition. Literally losing its material support or substance, the paper of mass mediacy, he argues, “exceed[s] the limits of the classic concept of the work as self-contained substance.”18 As I noted earlier, the booming print industry maintained its faith in the integrity of paper despite these changes in production methods. And “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” offers a way of modifying this argument about mass mediacy in an American context, since what differentiated the paper Melville bought in Dalton was its comparative strength, substantiveness, and longevity. The purified water from the Housatonic gave Dalton paper precisely these advantages.
While the first part of Melville’s diptych, by way of contrast, and the second part more directly, offer a vision of industrial mechanization, the makers of fine paper were notably discriminating in their adoption of new technology. They were certainly quick to take up the papermaking machine—costing “twelve thousand dollars only last autumn,” which Cupid shows Melville’s narrator and which Melville would have seen in action in Dalton (PT 331)—since, once engineers solved initial teething problems, this was the one piece of technology guaranteed to dramatically increase production without unduly compromising quality.
There were two kinds of paper machines in operation during this period, the Fourdrinier and the cylinder, both of which were continually being modified and improved. Valente claims that Melville would have seen a cylinder machine in the Old Berkshire Mill, as a machine of this sort was installed in 1832. Daniel Pidgeon, writing in 1884, gave 1831 as the approximate date of the arrival of a cylinder machine at the mill, “to be followed, twenty years later, by the Fourdrinier apparatus.” This would put the arrival of the Fourdrinier very close to the date of Melville’s visit. According to The History of Berkshire County, Massachusetts, however, a Fourdrinier was “placed in the Old Berkshire Mill in 1850.”19 Given that the machine in Melville’s story has only recently been installed, and taking into account Judith McGaw’s argument that fine-paper makers switched from cylinder machines to Fourdriniers during the 1840s because they made superior-quality paper, it is probable that Melville saw a Fourdrinier in action. The cost of the machine in the story also suggests a Fourdrinier; they were generally more expensive than cylinder machines. If Melville did visit the Old Red Mill, he would certainly have seen a Fourdrinier in operation; Zenas Crane & Sons installed the first Fourdrinier in Berkshire County in this mill in 1843.20 Given the proximity of the mills in Dalton, it is not inconceivable that Melville visited more than one mill.
The principal change that machines facilitated was the production of paper in long, continuous pieces. Handmade paper could only be produced in sheets, and the process involved three key operatives: the vatman, who formed the sheet by dipping a wooden-framed mesh into a vat of beaten water and cloth rags; the coucher, who transferred the sheet of pulp from the mold to a felt-covered board for initial drying; and the layboy, who separated the paper from the felt for further drying and finishing. Fourdrinier and cylinder machines incorporated all three processes into a combination of moving mesh and rollers. Pulp was added to a “headbox” at one end—the wet end—and paper emerged at the dry end for cutting. The machines were imposing in stature. Rolled out before him “like some long Eastern manuscript,” the narrator of Melville’s story says, “lay stretched one continuous length of iron framework—multitudinous and mystical, with all sorts of rollers, wheels, and cylinders, in slowly-measured and unceasing motion” (PT 331). That the machine itself reminds him of a paper manuscript, and an ancient one that has withstood the test of time, suggests the narrator is watching not a flimsy or perishable product forming before him. When he asks his guide, Cupid, if the “thin cobweb” of pulp ever breaks, Cupid replies that “it never is known to tear a hair’s point” (PT 333). The strength and durability of paper was paramount to Dalton papermakers. The customers for Crane & Company’s banknote paper, for instance, “repeatedly specified Fourdrinier paper.”21 The quality of this paper, together with the innovation in 1844 of silk threads to prevent counterfeiting or altering the denomination meant that Crane’s was soon supplying banks in Boston and New York. By 1879 it was the sole supplier of paper for official U.S. government currency and remains so today.
But Dalton papermakers were much more reluctant to utilize the kinds of chemicals or new technologies that might affect the quality of the paper they produced. When Melville’s narrator stops briefly in the mill’s rag room, for example, he observes girls standing before rag-cutting blades that are “immovably fixed,” sharpened by hand, and across which “the girls forever dragged long strips of rags, washed white, picked from baskets at one side; thus ripping asunder every seam, and converting the tatters almost into lint” (PT 329). While the narrator makes much of the way the girls face the upturned blades, comparing them to condemned state prisoners being led to their doom by an officer whose sword would face in that same direction, it is the hand-cutting process and the washed rather than bleached rags the girls are shredding that indicate the narrator is in a fine-paper mill. Mechanical rag cutters could not open seams as deftly as hand cutters, and neither could they remove the buttons the narrator notices “are all dropped off” from the old shirts and that he imagines may have come from the bachelors in the first part of the story (PT 330). David Carson himself questioned the effectiveness of rag-cutting machines when asking another mill owner “whether the machine cleans [the rags] as well as formerly when they were dressed by girls.”22 The vision of industrial labor shaping Melville’s story at this point draws on residual papermaking techniques that survive the advent of faster, mechanized processes.
Fine-paper makers also continued to use wooden rather than iron stock beaters and were cautious about introducing mechanical dryers and bleach boilers. They were also conscious of running their machines at the right speed to maintain paper quality. While Aaron Winter is only the latest critic to note that the nine-minute cycle of the pulp machine in “Paradise” suggests the nine-month period of the human gestation cycle, such a reading would privilege the symbolic unity of the story over its sensitivity to the papermaking process.23 When he is standing before the machine with Cupid, the narrator watches the pulp pour onto a “wide, sloping board” and listens and watches as Cupid takes him through the stages of the process by which the pulp is turned from a “thin and quivering” state into something resembling first “mere dragon-fly wing” and then, after passing over and between various cylinders, something that looks like paper (PT 331). That Melville’s narrator uses “stuff” as the collective noun for the “white, wet, woolly-looking” pulp signals a more general familiarity with papermaking vocabulary, since pulp was stored in a “stuffchest” before it entered the headbox of the papermaking machine, but he seems much less familiar with the details of the fine-papermaking process on a machine. The narrator is “amazed at the elongation, interminable convolutions, and deliberate slowness of the machine,” although Cupid reveals that the process takes only nine minutes, a fact he goes on to demonstrate (PT 332).
The word “deliberate” is meaningful here in both of its primary connotations. While the “interminable” process may appear to the narrator to be a sign of carefulness, the “slowness” may also be intentional. Fine-paper makers like those in Dalton, according to Judith McGaw, “exhibited conservatism by running their machines more slowly” than newspaper and other lower-quality paper mills in order to ensure the strength and quality of the paper they were producing. By 1887, paper machines were capable of running at 250 feet per minute.24 Even given the fact that Melville visited the mill in Dalton over thirty years earlier, when speeds might have only been half this figure or less, the nine minutes it takes for Cupid’s name to pass from pulp to cut foolscap is indeed a long time, as the narrator points out. Cupid, however, understands this to be the cycle required for fine-paper making, and the “patronizing air” the narrator senses in his guide suggests the importance of a knowledge about specialized machinery, carefully tuned to the production of fine paper, in an industry that constantly had to balance the demands of quality against scale and speed of output (PT 332). This sector understood the importance of managed, rather than indiscriminate, innovation in the production process, an awareness evident in the slowness of the machine and the presence of stamping and ruling machines deployed in fine-paper mills producing stationery.
As the observer of this process, the seedsman also repays further attention. With a business that stretched “through all the Eastern and Northern areas, and even fell into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas,” he is using envelopes at the rate of “several hundreds of thousands in a year” (PT 324, 325). His primary purpose for visiting the mill is to purchase paper directly from the manufacturer rather than the wholesaler. He explains that once folded, filled with seed, stamped, and “superscribed with the nature of the seeds contained,” these envelopes “assume not a little the appearance of business-letters ready for the mail” (PT 324–25). The scale, reach, and manner of his business locate him at the heart of a paper network facilitated by a series of changes not only to the manufacture of paper in the mid-nineteenth century, but also in postal legislation, which in turn provided the impetus for the growth of a culture of letters outside business and demand for ever-increasing quantities of paper.
A slew of postal acts in the late 1840s and early 1850s completely altered the postal terrain. The number of post offices and designated post roads increased rapidly; flat rates brought down the prohibitive cost of sending a letter, which was often higher than for sending newspapers and commercial items; and the principle of prepayment was introduced, in the form of postage stamps or prepaid envelopes, although this was not mandatory until 1855.25 Once envelopes were not charged as an extra piece of paper, their manufacture increased and was mechanized. An envelope-folding machine was first patented in the United States in 1849.26 If the prophylactic symbolism of the envelope is reinforced by the reliability of fine paper that “never is known to tear a hair’s point,” then such fine paper is also vital for the protection of an important business interest whose expansion and profitability are enhanced by the coordination of paper and postal technologies.
David Henkin has estimated that after money and photographs, “the next most popular enclosures in mid-century letters may have been agricultural samples—typically in the form of seeds.” This was not just because of businessmen like the narrator but because individuals exchanged seeds once postage rates fell. Increasingly the post became a place where the words of individuals and of businesses came into contact and circulated alongside one another. This has important consequences for thinking about the relationship between writing and the market, since it reverses our understanding that a preexisting culture of writing was altered by the market’s increasing influence; in the case of letters, it is individuals who are intruding on an existing system. Correspondents were, as Henkin suggests, “entering a terrain stamped by the culture of the market.”27 And Melville was certainly already conscious of the connections between paper and the post. Ishmael claims that the classification of whales in terms of paper sizes in Moby-Dick is “a ponderous task” to which “no ordinary letter-sorter in the Post-Office is equal” (MD 136).
This relationship between paper and the post in the United States is historically even more entwined, since the postal routes that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century often duplicated the rag routes by which paper manufacturers transported old rags to their mills. Alvin Wolcott, one of the early post riders in Berkshire County, who delivered mail as well as newspapers, advertised his services in the Berkshire Chronicle in 1788 and 1789 and made clear that he would “take in linen rags in pay for the newspapers at the store of his brother” and that “linen rags will be taken in lieu of cash.”28 A depot was eventually established in what doubled as the post office of West Stockbridge early in the nineteenth century; it became the center for rag-collecting activity after “bins went up in stores and taverns around every small village and hamlet” and “every fortnight a designated teamster traveled the county stopping in turn at each collecting site.”29 So developed did this Berkshire County network become that the routes were divided into franchises.
Owners of paper mills also followed the tradition set by Benjamin Franklin by combining their paper interests with postal administration. While Franklin’s training as a printer and his newspaper editing are well known, he also established the first rag warehouse in Philadelphia, helped establish or supply many more paper mills, and co-owned with Anthony Newhouse the Trout Creek paper mill, on whose paper he printed the 1748 edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, complete with his personalized watermark. In 1793 he published a pamphlet on the skills of Chinese papermakers, and in Melville’s classification of whales by paper size in Moby-Dick there is the echo of a poem attributed to Franklin that classifies men and women by paper quality. While the fop, according to Franklin, is gilt paper, poets are “the mere waste-paper of mankind.” And if “Mechanics, servants, farmers, and so forth / Are copy paper of inferior worth,” then the maiden is “innocently sweet / She’s fair white-paper, an unsullied sheet.”30 Franklin also took full advantage of his position as postmaster for Philadelphia to help the circulation of his own newspaper. As Wayne Fuller points out, “editor-postmasters could, by special arrangements, send their newspapers with their mail carriers and at the same time prevent their competitors from doing so.”31 While papermaking, newspaper editing, and the postal service had become specialized and more discrete enterprises in the nineteenth century, there were still several instances of mill owners becoming local postmasters in Berkshire County. Thomas Hurlbut, of the Owen & Hurlbut firm in South Lee, was appointed postmaster for that town in October 1826; Samuel Sturges, who owned the Greenwater Mill, was made postmaster in East Lee in September 1848; and Thomas Carson, son of David Carson, became postmaster in Dalton in 1857.32
As the mill-building boom exhausted the local supply of rags, the sourcing of rags also became a major problem for papermakers. This was as true in Europe as it was the United States. Melville is alert to it in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” when Cupid tells the narrator that, of the rags in the mill, some come “from the country round about; some from far over sea—Leghorn and London” (PT 330). Making the connection to the bachelors he knew in London, the seedsman speculates that the rags may be the shirts of those same bachelors. While this moment serves as a handy pivot to link the two parts of the story and draws the maids into the orbit of the bachelors such that the gendered discussion of sexuality and sterility is given further impetus, it is another example of how following the allegorical reading of “Paradise” sidesteps the economy of papermaking. Leghorn provides not just an alliterative connection to London, but a very practical connection to the papermaking taking place in the mill.
Leghorn (the anglicized name for Livorno) is a Tuscan port city that in the nineteenth century became a major exporter of linen rags. Fine-paper manufacturers like those in Dalton preferred linen. It was more expensive than cotton but its fibers were thicker and stronger. The paper produced from linen had a “hardness, or ‘rattle,’” which “gave it that most enduring quality” according to Valente.33 Italy was a good source for these manufacturers because linen was still the preferred fabric in the making of traditional clothing. As the 1850s saw an increasingly competitive international market for rags, many countries began to impose export restrictions. In 1855, in response to complaints from British paper manufacturers that the United States was buying up foreign rags, the British Parliament increased the tax on rag exports to reduce the number of British rags going overseas. The same had happened in the Netherlands the year before, and in 1857 France banned all rag exports. Spain and the German states also took steps to protect their domestic supplies. The papal states banned exports in 1857. In contrast, Leghorn opened a new port to replace the old Medici port in 1854 as a way of coping with increased trade to the United States.
The accretion of these details is an important part of Melville’s engagement with the material economy of paper. In the contemplation of his subject, Melville’s emphasis on fine paper shows an imagination that does not “reduce paper to the function or topos of an inert surface laid out beneath some markings, a substratum meant for sustaining them, for ensuring their survival or existence,” as Derrida claims is often the problem with reductive treatments of paper. To think of paper in this way would be to see it only as the material support for printed products whose workings and exchanges take precedence over what lies beneath the surface. Rather, according to Derrida, paper is “a labyrinth whose walls return the echoes of the voice or song it carries itself” and thus “is utilized in an experience involving the body, beginning with hands, eyes, voice, ears.” The result is that paper “has always proclaimed its inadequacy and its finitude.”34 With this appreciation of paper and Melville’s paper knowledge in mind, what is there to say of “Bartleby” and “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”?
Of “Bartleby,” the first thing is this: Melville gives us not a writer refusing to write, but a writer writing. Reading the story as a parable of walls in 1953, Leo Marx’s central premise was that “Bartleby” “was written in a time of deep hopelessness” after the disastrous reviews of Pierre. At the same time, Marx first imagined the correspondence that indelibly linked “Bartleby” to the economy of print: Bartleby is Melville, and Bartleby’s refusal to check and write copy is the refusal of a writer who wants to grapple with difficult philosophical questions rather than reproduce conventional genres.35 Despite the “Bartleby” industry that has been booming since the 1950s, the general thrust of Marx’s reading remains intact. But if the biographical correspondence is tenuous then so is the impetus for thinking “Bartleby” corresponds to Melville’s alienation from the economy of print.
“Bartleby” is one of three examples in Melville’s magazine work of a narrator who is not telling but writing the story he is narrating.36 The writer we should attend to in this story is not the copyist or refusenik Bartleby, but the lawyer who uses paper for his “briefs”—one of the uses the later narrator in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” imagines for the paper he watches being made—but paper on which he also creates original text as he remembers the young law-copyist he once employed; the lawyer is a writer whose interaction with paper is hidden in plain sight. Critics have not neglected the lawyer. The discourses he uses to tell the story of his acquaintance with Bartleby are well understood to show his own ideological disposition: a professional man of business whose bad faith makes him incapable of understanding Bartleby’s predicament. As a writer and handler of paper he is little understood. That Melville intends his lawyer-narrator to also be a writer is clear from the first paragraph of the story, where the act of writing predominates. Biographies of other scriveners the lawyer waives in favor of “a few passages in the life of Bartleby”; the fuller life “is an irreparable loss to literature,” and so the reader must settle for what the lawyer’s “own astonished eyes saw of Bartleby.” In general, law-copyists or scriveners are the “interesting and somewhat singular set of men, of whom as yet nothing that I know of has ever been written” (PT 13). Until now, that is.
As a writer, the lawyer is alert to—one might even say obsessed with—the uses and abuses of paper in his office, the implements used for marking it, and how writing is or is not carried out upon it. Bartleby is not the only character whose relationship to this paper world is idiosyncratic. As his temper frays in the afternoon, so Turkey blots the lawyer’s documents when “incautious in dipping his pen into his inkstand.” The pens themselves are “impatiently split . . . to pieces,” and Turkey’s papers are boxed “in a most indecorous manner.” He gesticulates and makes violent thrusts with his ruler (PT 15). When Turkey uses a moistened ginger cake to seal a mortgage document, the lawyer comes “within an ace of dismissing him” (PT 19). Nippers tries in vain to find the correct height for his writing table, using chips and blocks of wood and pasteboard before going “so far as to attempt an exquisite adjustment by final pieces of folded blotting-paper” (PT 17). When the lawyer finally packs up his belongings to escape his office, the last item he removes is the screen behind which he places Bartleby when he first arrives. The screen is “folded up like a huge folio” and, thinking himself free of Bartleby at last, the lawyer writes, “I tore myself from him whom I had so longed to be rid of” (PT 39). To represent separation as tearing aptly summarizes an office where all the confrontations—between the lawyer and his scriveners and among the scriveners themselves—are confrontations over what should be done with paper.
Chief among these confrontations, of course, is Bartleby’s refusal to read or to write. Although central to the author’s profession, reading and writing need not necessarily be the occasion to make a connection between Melville and the economy of print; Bartleby’s refusal is also a reminder that the legal profession is one of many that rely on reading and writing. In “Bartleby,” Melville was already imagining how the paper that drops off the machine in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” would have nonliterary uses. Before becoming a writer Melville had long observed and experienced the handling and accumulation of paper. Sent to work at the New York State Bank as a twelve-year-old boy, he filed and copied surrounded by the paper money, bonds, and mortgages on which the bank’s business relied. Following that, he moved to work at his brother Gansevoort’s cap and fur store, where, among other things we know he wrote out receipts; later, he likely wrote Typee in the law offices of Gansevoort and his younger brother Allan, where the raw materials he needed for his authorship—paper, pens, and desk space—were all available because they were same raw materials lawyers required to carry out their business.
In a world of work that more generally relies on paper interactions, Bartleby’s refusal can be seen as an aversion not to the reading and writing that is the stuff of authorship but an aversion to interacting with paper itself. The lawyer admits he has “never seen him reading—no, not even a newspaper” (PT 28). Twice the lawyer asks Bartleby to go to the post office for him: the first time to collect mail, the second to deliver mail (PT 25, 32). On both occasions Bartleby prefers not to. Bartleby uses words only sparingly when he communicates with his trademark perfunctoriness; he will have nothing to do with words at all if that means engaging with paper. Ultimately, once he has given up each of his clerking duties, Bartleby will not check copy to ensure correspondence between different versions; he will not write copy to ensure correspondence between a source and a written, shared version; and he will not deliver or collect the letters by which written correspondence takes place. The repeated refusals of Bartleby to change his mind on this matter become a problem for the lawyer because his writing of the story has to grapple with consequences for which he can discern no legible causes.
As I reiterate later in this chapter when discussing “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” paper’s role as a medium of communication, as the place where abstract thought takes physical form, makes legibility a problem for Melville. “Bartleby” proleptically imagines what in “Paradise” is represented by the seedsman’s apoplexy in the face of paper whose uses are without end. For the narrators of both stories the problem of legibility is made manifest in similar circumstances: when workers merge eerily with their material surroundings and the narrators are oddly affected.
In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” this occurs most vividly when the narrator contemplates the abstract force driving the papermaking machine, stands “spell-bound and wandering in my soul,” and sees the pallid faces of the maids in the “pallid incipience of the pulp” (PT 334). In “Bartleby,” when the lawyer enters the office while the scrivener is out, he contemplates the loneliness of Bartleby’s life and is gripped by an “overpowering stinging melancholy,” following which, he says, “sad fancyings—chimeras, doubtless, of a sick and silly brain—led on to other and more special thoughts, concerning the eccentricities of Bartleby. Presentiments of strange discoveries hovered round me.” As the maids appear to the narrator in the later story, so the lawyer sees Bartleby: “The scrivener’s pale form appeared to me laid out, among uncaring strangers, in its shivering winding sheet” (PT 28). Sheet here means a cloth or shroud; elsewhere in the story sheet only means paper, as when the lawyer tells Bartleby “I want you to help me compare this sheet here” (PT 20). The narrator in “Paradise,” when he asks what makes the girls so “sheet-white,” is told by Cupid that their “handling of such white bits of sheets all the time makes them so sheety” (PT 330–31). Where the seedsman hurries his exit from the paper mill and retreats to an “inscrutable nature,” in the lawyer’s imagining of Bartleby’s pale form against the sheet “did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion” (PT 29). At this point he determines to separate himself from Bartleby. Like the seedsman who escapes the paper that has uses without end, so the lawyer, as he writes, “tore” himself from the object that confounds his trust in legibility.
In “Bartleby,” the lawyer who relies on paper to seal agreements becomes the writer of a story where agreement—between employer and scrivener, between Bartleby’s actions and their cause—is hard to discern. The narrator attempts to make up the deficit between what he sees and what he can explain by grasping, in the sequel, for the rumor that Bartleby once worked at the Dead Letter Office in Washington. He does so at the same moment he reiterates his status as a writer rather than a lawyer: just “ere parting with the reader” of this “little narrative” does he repeat the “vague report” that is of “a certain strange suggestive interest” to him. The suggestion is wrapped up in that perennially confusing question: “Dead letters! Does it not sound like dead men?” The obvious answer is “no,” and by confounding the possibility of any redemptive correspondence between even the sound of letters and men it provides a fitting conclusion to a story in which the relationship between the lawyer and Bartleby develops through the reading and writing (or nonreading and nonwriting) of marks on paper.37 But the lawyer also asks himself a further question: “Conceive a man by nature and misfortune prone to a pallid hopelessness, can any business seem more fitted to heighten it than that of continually handling these dead letters, and assorting them for the flames?” (PT 45). As much interpretation as question, the lawyer’s words give shape to the story he is writing by suggesting that one’s personality is confirmed when one is brought into contact with an environment that shares similar qualities: hopelessness by hopelessness equals hopelessness squared. Bartleby’s fate is the fate of the dead letters only according to the lawyer’s written narrative.
And yet the correspondence for which the lawyer searches is not confirmed by the rumor he finds so suggestive. All the lawyer can give the narrative is questions that either make little sense (dead letters do not sound like dead men) or rely on some assent outside the text never given: yes, working in a dead letter office might heighten the feeling of hopelessness if one is predisposed to this outlook. The lawyer’s narration defers correspondence, and the reader knows well enough not to believe a narrator who has already demonstrated his partiality and provided reason enough to judge harshly his ethical prevarication. Between Bartleby’s fate and what is known of him there is only the paper on which the narrator writes his story.
By taking paper as his material, in both senses of that word, Melville avoided the precipice that Fitz-James O’Brien warned would await him unless he wrote more like Addison to make his notch. O’Brien was wrong. Melville did not need to write more like Addison; he needed to satisfy himself as a writer. Leo Marx saw that in the lawyer-narrator, rather than in Bartleby, the reader finds what affirmation the story contains. This is not because he is a writer—for Marx, Melville is Bartleby and Bartleby is the writer—but because, unlike the stubborn writer Bartleby, the lawyer does not turn his back on society. “The eerie story of Bartleby,” Marx writes, “is a compassionate rebuke to the self-absorption of the artist, and so a plea that he devote himself to keeping strong his bonds with the rest of mankind.” Marx was wrong too. Not because he saw some affirmation in the lawyer but because he argued that affirmation results from the lawyer’s belief in “human brotherhood.”38 “Bartleby” affirms writing and the writer. The lawyer may reach for correspondences like the narrator of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” but even if writers may always fail to achieve such a goal that is no reason to stop writing.
Melville continued his fascination with paper in the second part of “Paradise” by using a genre well known to readers of Harper’s in the early 1850s. The factory or works tour was a popular way of introducing the marvels of the industrial age. I discuss the importance of the sketch genre to magazine writing in chapter 2, but these tours were contemporary versions of the sketch tradition that emerged out of the eighteenth-century magazine, through Washington Irving, Mary Russell Mitford, Charles Dickens when he was still Boz, and William Thackeray. Some of the examples Harper’s published were reprints from British magazines, but the magazine clearly thought there was enough appetite for this kind of sketch irrespective of national setting. In the August 1850 issue, the Harper’s reader was given a vicarious tour of the railroad works in Crewe, one of the major railway manufacturing towns in nineteenth-century Britain. The lead article in the May 1851 issue was a description by Jacob Abbott of the Novelty Iron Works in New York City, which manufactured “marine steam-engines of the largest class.” In an article titled “Galvanoplasty” the narrator invited readers to “enter the workshop of M. Coblentz, in the Rue Charlot de Paris.” Those readers also found themselves in the Weovil (a misspelling of Yeovil) Biscuit Manufactory in southern England and the Hounslow Mills to see the making of gunpowder.39 An industrial paper mill was an eminently suitable subject for a Harper’s article.
But this story has wrong-footed critics who prefer to read forward from the occasion of its magazine publication rather than backward to consider how it dramatizes a writer’s imaginative labor with the materials of his trade. Paper surfaces as a topic in this story, McLaughlin argues, where “the literary text as a self-contained work is itself shaken by the distracting force of a mass mediacy to which it is inextricably linked.”40 But how inextricable is the link? Melville writes about paper on paper, and the magazine in which the story appeared was also manufactured and circulated in paper form. But that does not mean Melville prioritizes the end function of exchange and circulation—the engines of mass mediacy—the moment he composes a story with paper as its subject. Reading backward rather than forward refuses the inextricability of the link between literary text and mass mediacy.
The paper manufactured in the New England mill of Melville’s story has yet to reach an exchange system. And it is a raw material that will never be made into books and magazines. Other professions use the paper on which Melville writes; the words on that paper might at some future point, in the abstracted form of books and magazines, pass into a culture of exchange.41 But they may not even make that journey, as Melville’s lost novel The Isle of the Cross did not. For Melville, then, as for Derrida, “paper is in the world that is not a book.”42 In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville gestures toward a generalized circuit of literary exchange in the first part of the diptych, but he is most preoccupied with the manufacturing process and laboring environment that sees paper, rather than books and magazines, entering the world.
Because of this, the story anticipates and short-circuits the two key correspondences of which critics make so much in order to establish Melville’s place at the heart of a literary market: the internal correspondence between the two parts of the diptych; and the external correspondence between the story’s symbolic or allegorical form and 1850s America. The story’s narrator is central to the short-circuiting process. Also vital is a series of distinctions the narrator witnesses between the abstract force driving the papermaking machine and the purposes to which users will put its paper. While some may find its way back into the hands of those “dreamy men” who write upon it for Putnam’s, the paper will also end up in the hands of people like the seedsman narrator, who use it for purposes beyond the literary marketplace. Moments considered to serve a symbolic function in this story, then, are actually deeply embedded in Melville’s understanding of the manufacture and nonliterary uses of paper. These facts collectively shape the interplay between the story’s imaginative and material domains to the extent that paper rather than print becomes the story’s subject.
The tendency of critics to move forward from “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” to broader cultural conditions is driven partly by the perceived allegorical nature of the story itself. The distinctly gendered nature of the different worlds of leisure and work in the story is now well served by readings noting a subtext that denies in biological and artistic terms “the idea of female originating power” or envisions a nightmare “division of labor so pervasive that it would divide the sexes and sterilize mankind.”43 The narrator completes the circle of sex and gender in the story, and the paper he uses to distribute his seed duly takes on its prophylactic role in the context of the machine room, which the narrator describes as “stifling with a strange, blood-like, abdominal heat, as if here, true enough, were being finally developed the germinous particles lately seen” (PT 331). Sexual difference has an impact on industrial labor and the authorial labor from which, Michael Newbury argues, it “is not separate,” but on which it “has already intruded . . . as a trope.”44 But if this work helps extend the significance of “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” to an antebellum context in which writing, reading, and authorship were becoming subject to gendered market conditions, the critical labor expended to locate the story in this context remains paradoxical. On the one hand, it is convincing and sophisticated; on the other, it is too easily led by a story that does so much of the critical work itself and by the nature of the symbols at the critics’ disposal.
Given the static representations of men and women offered by the story, it is hard to disagree with Sylvia Jenkins Cook that this is Melville’s “‘outside’ story that embodies his most extreme sense of the otherness that existed for him in both women and poor people.”45 The effort to read these static figures also leads to interpretations that overreach the material at hand. David Dowling’s claim, for instance, that “the women factory workers are significantly both book producers and victims of capitalism” is driven more by his need to make an argument about the entrepreneurship of authors faced with market conditions than it is by the story itself.46 In abstracting paper production to book production Dowling misrepresents the fact that the paper made in the mill is for several purposes—“sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants” (PT 333)—but not for books.
The impulse to read Melville’s symbols as coherently connected is taken one stage further by Cindy Weinstein. She reads the story as an allegory and part of a more pervasive and self-conscious attempt by American writers to contest the ideology that labor and the work ethic could lead to personal progress and fulfillment, especially when jobs were becoming increasingly mechanized and monotonous. By revealing its own artifice, Weinstein argues, not only is Melville’s literary labor entwined with the labor of the factory girls, but the self-evident artifice of allegory and the flatness of the story’s characters “is itself allegorical . . . of cultural anxieties about changing relations between labor and agency.”47 “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” has inspired a criticism that makes use of Melville’s symbols of sex and gender, labor and leisure, for the purpose of allegorizing in the broadest possible fashion the story’s representations of hierarchies of gender difference and of market conditions for writers.
Casting the internal contents of a story as an allegory and then making claims about the external allegorical function of these contents, however, is a particularly gratuitous separation of a text from its conditions of production. It is a method that relies too heavily on an unbroken chain of correspondences both internal, between the symbols and imagery of the two parts of the story, and external, between the story’s imagery and symbols and the historical conditions of labor, gender, industrialization, and commercialized authorship. So how is the story different if the plain facts of paper are brought to the fore?
In watching the paper being made on the machine, the seedsman narrator of Melville’s story is brought into contact with the economy of paper in which the paradoxes of its labyrinthine qualities, its “inadequacy” and yet its “finitude,” are made evident to him. The production of this material is given a life before it enters the economy of print and the process of exchange; the narrator’s contemplation of this time of production dominates the second part of the diptych. If one important strand of the treatment of this part of the story is to see it as an allegory of the dangers of mechanization, such treatments rely unquestioningly on linking the mechanization of papermaking and the marketization of writing and authorship. It is this chain of correspondences I want to uncouple and which “Paradise” itself, through the figure of the narrator, snaps apart. One starting point is to make a distinction between the machine-produced paper and the more abstract concept of continual movement that emerges in Melville’s treatment of papermaking, since the latter is “so specially terrible” to the narrator as he observes the machine. While “machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort,” he says, “strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart,” the machine itself is subject to some more dramatic “metallic necessity,” or an “unbudging fatality which governed it” (PT 333).
The narrator reveals himself here to be quite familiar with operating machinery. The fact that it is only in “some moods” that machinery can have this effect suggests an experience of machinery in other moods. The first half of the story too easily creates an image of the narrator as a dreamy character, rather than the experienced and successful businessman he becomes in the second part. Someone who distributes hundreds of thousands of letters is no stranger to the objects of mass production or the demands of a mass market. The narrator is certainly not represented as an innocent coming into contact with machinery for the first time. To distinguish between the mechanical apparatus of papermaking and the mysterious force that seems to control it is not just to raise questions about mechanization itself; it also questions the reliability of a correspondence between abstract process (the invisible force) and literal instantiation (the machine). Or, one might say, between “hideous and intolerable allegory” and “plain facts” (MD 205) Readings of the story too often rely on assuming the viability of correspondences of this kind, between the representation of mechanized papermaking in the story and the reality of marketized authorship in mid-nineteenth-century America.
The role of fine paper in this process is also significant. In contrast to the “autocrat cunning of the machine” that sends the narrator giddy and makes him see the pallid faces of the maids in the “pallid incipience of the pulp” (PT 333, 334), the cut paper that drops off the end of the machine sets the narrator thinking in different ways. In Melville’s words, it sets him “wondering” rather than “wandering.” As the narrator watches the paper “dropping, dropping, dropping” off the machine he says that his “mind ran on in wonderings of those strange uses to which those thousand sheets would eventually be put”; while considering the abstract force driving the machine he stands “spell-bound and wandering in my soul” as he watches the forming paper go past him (PT 333–34). So only at the end of the papermaking process, when the paper is subdivided into the raw material of cultural usage in all its myriad dimensions—the “sermons, lawyers’ briefs, physicians’ prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants” (PT 333)—does the paper stop being a part of that “unbudging fatality” one might argue is at the root of the correspondences I discussed earlier. Correspondence between mechanically produced product and abstract process is broken at this end point because, as the narrator says, “all sorts of writings would be writ on those now vacant things” and, as if to substantiate this, at the end of his list of examples he concludes, “and so on, without end” (PT 333).
There is no correspondence, then, between the mass-produced paper sheets and the uses to which they will be put. While the narrator thinks of John Locke when he sees the blank sheets of paper, when he contemplates the “autocratic cunning of the machine” he sees in the pulp the faces of the factory girls. In the first instance there is an associative thinking that delegates the metaphor of blank mind and blank paper to Locke; in the second there is a kind of mesmerized thinking that sees the maids literally embodied on the paper. The loose connection of the first is juxtaposed against the strict correspondence of the second. The very lack of connection as the paper drops off the machine between paper, process, and end use undermines a reading of the story that tries to make a virtue of allegorical equivalence between story and cultural condition. The narrator’s “wonderings” at this point are suggestive and imply multiplicity and unknowability in the “strange” uses that might be made of the paper; his “wandering” is, paradoxically, not at all mobile and all too fixed like the “unbudging fatality” driving the machine. He is, as he says, “spell-bound.”
The chronological sequencing of the story, which draws to a conclusion through the narrator’s linking of the maids and the pulp, might appear to give this moment diegetic privilege. But this is only because it appears to ratify the story’s internal correspondences between the bachelors, the maids, and the papermaking process, the seeds of which the narrator has been planting all the way through the second part of the story. Thus when he first sees the maids he notes that “at rows of blank-looking counters sat rows of blank-looking girls with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding blank paper.” Of the two maids responsible for ruling the paper, the one handling the blank paper has a brow that is “young and fair,” while the one handling the ruled paper at the other end of the process has a brow that is “ruled and wrinkled.” Seeing the maids embossed on the pulp ratifies the narrator’s earlier belief that the girls “did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheel” (PT 328).
The issue here is whether to grant precedence to the ending of the narrative or the ending of the papermaking process and whether the strategic organization of correspondences in the narrator’s account outweigh the one moment when correspondence is most clearly broken. The fact that Melville visited the paper mill in Dalton and the pointedness with which he drew attention in his letter to Duyckinck to the papermaker’s stamp, the papermaking industry of Berkshire County, and his identification as a writer among other writers in the area, are decisive factors here. They help identify Melville’s own understanding of his place within an economy and a culture of paper. The annotation might simply add some biographical interest to the letter were it not for the fact that the purpose of the rest of the letter, as I mentioned in the introduction, is to refuse Duyckinck’s request that Melville submit a contribution and a daguerreotype of himself to Holden’s Dollar Magazine. In the context of this refusal to participate in magazine culture, the purpose to which paper is put becomes all the more significant. Against the paper as it exists in the mill, ready for “all sorts of writings . . . without end,” stand the pages of Holden’s Dollar Magazine, which Melville refuses to fill not only with his image but also with the kind of popular sea piece for which he was known in the early part of his career but from which he was trying to distance himself at that very moment in his writing of Moby-Dick on fine paper bought in Dalton. By differentiating so pointedly between the paper that marks a “great neighborhood for authors” and the paper of printed magazine culture that he thinks will bring about his oblivion, Melville draws the sharpest of distinctions between the economy of paper and the economy of print.
The figure of the narrator in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” also becomes all the more intriguing if, as I am suggesting, the end of the papermaking process rather than the end of the narrative should take interpretative precedence. What exactly are we to make of the emphasis on those correspondences that have given the story its symbolic and allegorical leverage and produced such creative critical accounts of gender and biology and labor and authorship? The narrators in Melville’s other short fiction—particularly in “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno”—offer a version of events that is as interrogative of the narrators themselves and their subject positions as it is of the events narrated. A narrator who continually reaches for symbolic correspondence when faced with the plain facts of papermaking is not necessarily to be trusted; the symbols belong to the narrator more than they do to Melville, and the clumsy groping for connection the narrator undertakes is what the narrative questions rather than ratifies.
One can almost hear the seedsman’s mind spinning when he picks up the reference to London in Cupid’s response to his question about the sourcing of the rags in order to make the link with the bachelors. And Cupid’s misunderstanding of the narrator’s question about bachelor’s buttons—taking him to mean the flowers of that name rather than the buttons from the shirts of bachelors—only emphasizes the idiosyncrasy of the narrator’s perspective and the effort required on his part to produce correspondences that are not obvious to Cupid. Establishing, with another question, that the factory manager is a bachelor, it is the narrator who appears to be inventing rather than merely reporting the connections. He, after all, describes the “white, wet, wooly-looking stuff” as “not unlike the albuminous part of an egg” and then immediately describes the machine room’s “abdominal heat” in which “were being finally developed the germinous particles” (PT 331); and he, more generally, constructs his experience in the second half of the diptych in the light of the first. The opening part of the story has attracted much less critical attention than the second primarily because its role in the text is ancillary; it is the pretext upon which the second part of the story is stamped in relief. The seedsman is not just a businessman whose profession locates him as a cipher of coition, fertilized or obstructed; he is also a seedsman in his role as narrator, planting the literary images and scenes which he tends and harvests in the second part of his story.
In “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno,” we find narrators whose blind spots and misreadings are the object of analysis as much as they are the literary architecture by which that analysis proceeds. In “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” Melville offers up a narrator with a different reading practice, one who proliferates connection and correspondence to such a degree across the two parts of the diptych that he too becomes a narrator whose partiality and idiosyncrasies the reader is asked to contemplate. If Melville delegates to the narrator the connections between bachelors and maids, leisure and work, in order to unmoor them from secure surroundings, then the very rigidity of the narrator’s compulsion for correspondence in the diptych form resembles the “unbudging fatality” he contemplates as he watches the machine and as Cupid tells him that the machine “must go . . . just that very way, and at that very pace you there plainly see it go” (PT 333).
Standing in stark juxtaposition is the alternative the narrator touches on but refuses: the “strange uses . . . without end” to which the paper dropping off the end of the machine might be put. In “Bartleby,” the retrospective contemplation of his scrivener serves the purpose of enabling the lawyer’s observation of his own identity at a distance safe enough to prevent damage. A similar process occurs for the seedsman. When pacing before the machine in contemplation the narrator is “struck . . . by the inevitability as the evolvement-power in all its motions.” This passage follows immediately after he contemplates Locke’s understanding of the human mind at birth as a sheet of blank paper and as “something destined to be scribbled on, but what sort of characters no soul might tell” (PT 333). The shift here between inevitability and indefiniteness is one that clearly unnerves the seedsman and causes him to stand spellbound and wandering in his soul.
What I am suggesting the narrator sees when he watches the paper dropping off the end of the machine, and what Melville is asking the reader to see in the narrator, is something that confounds trust in correspondence and inevitability. The machine illustrates for the narrator in physical form the rigidity of his own mental need for control, harmonization, and correspondence. Yet despite being driven by the inevitable force of continual motion, the machine still produces blank paper, which, at this stage before reaching the maids in the folding room, is literally and philosophically unruly. What confounds the narrator is not the force driving the machine but the failure of this force to replicate itself in the object produced: fine, high-quality paper of substance that has uses “without end.” In this reading, the story becomes almost a paean to the possibilities of paper before it enters an economy of print. Paper as a material form is what fascinates Melville; the manufacture and social embeddedness of this material is what the story so subtly and meticulously details. Rather than merely a topos to support the markings of print culture, paper in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” becomes the location of the narrator’s discomfort and his recognition that writing, or scribbling, will only, as Christina Lupton writes, “disavow an absolute referent and gesture to a world of correspondences over which the writer has no control.”48
Correspondence, of course, can signify both a sense of relation or agreement as well as communication by letter. This double meaning helps when thinking about Melville’s imagination of paper and the post in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The narrator’s discomfort follows almost immediately upon his writing Cupid’s name on a scrap piece of paper and dropping it into the pulp to test the speed of the machine. As the piece of paper containing yet another form of correspondence—of name to person—drops off the machine, “with my ‘Cupid’ half faded out of it, and still moist and warm,” the narrator concludes, “my travels were at an end, for here was the end of the machine” (PT 332). Lupton suggests that “the more closely we look at ink on paper, the more the meaning of the characters recedes from us; the more we think about paper and print, the more cause we have to suspect that they fall beyond the reach of intellection.”49 In “Paradise” the narrator is pitched into a crisis of certainty after just such an observation of the marks he has cast on paper. Against all attempts at regulation—intricate machinery, the schedule of the workers, the nine-minute cycle that turns pulp into paper, the foolscap size of the uniformly blank paper, the narrative voice that seeks balance through symbol and correspondence—stand all those kinds of writing that will unpredictably and inadequately get scribbled upon the paper dropping predictably off the end of the machine.
The narrator’s solution is to hurry his exit and retreat to an “inscrutable nature” that can be trusted not to pass judgment on his final efforts at harmonization when he exclaims, in an ending that echoes the final words of the lawyer in “Bartleby” and ties the two parts of the diptych together, “Oh Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!” (PT 335).
Melville’s visit to the Old Berkshire Mill in Dalton in the winter of 1851 and his imagining of what he saw there in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” actually say very little about the economy of printing and publishing, which by 1860 had become the leading industry in New York. Instead, these events situate Melville in rural western Massachusetts, in a county dominated by the production of paper, and as a purchaser with a specialized knowledge about the material on which his writing career flowered and wilted. His letter to Duyckinck shows that paper was as important to Melville’s understanding of himself as a writer as was the antebellum book market or the commercial understanding of authorship David Dowling suggests generated so many anxieties about “the craft” of writing.50 Traveling to a paper mill by sleigh and buying his own store of fine paper is just as likely to have confirmed Melville’s sense of himself as a craftsman; there is little anxiety in his letter to Duyckinck at any rate. Michael Newbury claims that in “Paradise” Melville “suggests that meaningfully legible texts and acts of writing simply do not or cannot emerge though mechanical production on an industrial scale.”51 The fact he completed Moby-Dick on machine-produced paper surely proves otherwise. Legibility is a problem for Melville not because of mechanization but because of the status of paper as a medium of communication.
The purpose of Melville’s writing, so far as one can understand it in these two magazine stories, is not to make his notch or to satisfy some abstract obligation to society. Melville, thankfully, becomes more self-absorbed, not less; he turns to the material on which his writing life relied to reaffirm his own sense of himself as a writer even as he was writing for the magazine market. Ultimately, the success of the two stories is that they do more than mundanely echo the shrill economy of the commercialized print culture in which they appeared and in which Melville was failing. They are not noisy empty vessels. Melville’s stories quietly reiterate that writers are not confined by the paper containers in which their work circulates. Magazine stories might tell something of the economy that gives them a public life, but that is not all, and certainly not the most interesting thing, they can tell. Pressing one’s ear to Melville’s paper stories one hears the stiff linen fibers bend under the pressure of his hand and the decelerating capillary motion as the paper’s sizing stops Melville’s ink from spreading too far. These noises constitute the soundtrack of a paper life. Melville understood that paper offered no guarantees to writers; his faith in it was not unconditional. But only someone who understood paper so intimately could explore how it mediated the writing life. To recuperate from the strains of writing novels, Melville continued writing, continued to write deeply, and embedded himself in the economy of paper.