Ivy G. Wilson
After making his way through a mountainous ridge en route to a factory tucked deep away in New England, the nameless protagonist of Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” (1855) finds himself awestruck by the factory’s centerpiece—a grand machine that yields perfectly pristine sheets of paper. “Yours is a most wonderful factory,” announces the narrator to the proprietor Old Bach, “Your great machine is a miracle of inscrutable intricacy.”1 Captivated by it, the protagonist-narrator experiences a kind of phantasmagoric sensation where he is astounded by the “unvarying punctuality and precision” of the machine and equally repulsed by “the unbudging fatality which governed it” (677–78).
The narrator’s experience before the machine is only the most severe hermeneutical problematic within each of the two individual sketches, as well as between them, a problematic that frames the story as a whole as one preoccupied with perception, recognition, and meaning making. On the one hand, the narrator is aware that the machine is “inscrutable,” endowed with a science that exceeds common knowledge. On the other hand, he routinely tries to comprehend these moments of inscrutability through acts of translation where he substitutes one image for another. “It is this perfect ‘translatability,’” writes Wai Chee Dimock, “between the two categories [of class and gender] that gives the story its spatial clarity, its status as a topographical whole made up of two categoric locations, ‘paradise’ and ‘tartarus.’”2 Decoding the parts of the story themselves as objects, then, is as necessary as examining the symbolic objects represented within the story.
The various crises of perception depicted in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” coincided with the emergence in the mid-nineteenth century with a shift in the social life of “things” that made them increasingly illegible, if not untranslatable.3 This is not to say that “things” do not have an inherent or intrinsic meaning tied to their functionality, purpose, or use; it is to say, rather, that under global capitalism, their ontology began to veil their genealogy.4 Melville’s story, which highlights the production of paper, whose “thingness” or materiality emblematizes not only a physical transformation but also a metaphysical (ex)change, needs to be understood for the way the processes of commodification telescope a problematic between sensorial perception and hermeneutical interpretation.
Turning to aspects of Marx’s well-known critique of alienation and his idea of commodity fetishism, I argue that the paper in Melville’s story functions as a “social hieroglyphic” that illuminates the way the opacity of things increasingly necessitates acts of translation to be comprehended. Indeed, the way that Marx understands the work that historical materialism can do to reveal the mystical qualities of commodity fetishism is echoed in the new materialisms, especially that of Bruno Latour when he intimates that part of the charge of new materialism is to “overcome” the “opacity” of things, objects, and artifacts.5 The hieroglyphic is an apt concept not only because of the obsession with it by nineteenth-century U.S. writers but also because of its centrality to Marx’s understanding of labor—as he writes in Capital, “It is value, rather, that converts every product into a social hieroglyphic.”6 In an important sense, then, Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism, specifically as it relates to “product” and “conversion,” is paralleled by aspects of new materialist critique insofar as it is concerned not simply with physical matter per se but also with the multitudinous processes of materialization. Furthermore, the hieroglyphic is an especially apt concept for this Melville story, where the narrator figuratively transforms one thing into another or performs acts of translation in an attempt to apprehend a more latent meaning.
The question of materialism in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” illuminates a philosophical problem about how to comprehend the symbolic meaning of things such as the bachelors’ Jericho horn and the maids’ paper as aesthetic objects as much as it illuminates political problems about modes of contemporary social stratification. Whereas “The Tartarus of Maids” section overemphasizes the production of paper as a thing, it should also be read as a hieroglyphic—as a mark that denotes an object or concept within a discursive system—that symbolizes the partitioning of subjectivity within a reimagined system of social belonging. Such a focus on the hermeneutics of materiality intimates that Marx’s understanding of the political economy of abstraction and separation also functions as an analogue to aesthetic practices that experiment with techniques of opacity and obfuscation. Melville’s text occasions a moment both to reflect on the formation of leisure and labor structures in an emergent global capitalist economy and also to consider how certain literary techniques preoccupied with the valences of representation might simultaneously be understood as both a sign and a symptom of this very economy.
The Brethren of the Order of Celibacy, whose Temple is lined with portraits of “great men of mark—famous nobles, judges, and Lord Chancellors,” are themselves lawyers who wax philosophic and jocundly converse of translating poetry (671). The narrator makes his way to the designated location of the Temple, “indeed, a city by itself” (671), after receiving an invitation from one R. F. C. “The Paradise of Bachelors” is at least partly based on Melville’s own travel to London in December 1849. While there he was the guest of Robert Francis Cook (the R. F. C. of the story) and recorded the trip in his journal.7 It is here that the distinguished men withdraw from the world, only to translate their experiences via an apotheosis after imbibing no small amount of alcohol. One of the nine bachelors tells of “how mellowly he lived when a student at Oxford,” another of his travels to the Low Countries, a third of his frequent visits to the British Museum, where, among other things, he viewed “Oriental manuscripts” (672).
The men of “The Paradise of Bachelors” and the narrator form an interstitial community, a gendered and class-stratified constituency with similar dispositions and inclinations regarding high culture. Unlike the women’s in “The Tartarus of Maids,” theirs is an alienation self-imposed, temporary, and gentrified with private clubs that are circumscribed at least by their professions as mostly solicitors and solicitors in training—which is to say, “white collar” against the women’s “blue collar.” The bachelors self-consciously attempt to create distance from the base materiality of everyday life by creating a metanarrative layer—a layer that the narrator comprehends and attempts to translate for the reader. The women have no such distance and, importantly, have no such interlocutor.
In contrast to the women of the second sketch, who are clearly on clock time, the bachelors appear almost outside of time itself, as if they are not only in a different space but in a different temporality altogether. Indeed, one of the things that illustrates their status as part of the leisure class is their relationship to time. Following the clock of a “wine-chronometer,” the narrator recounts,
I have above endeavored to give some slight schedule of the general plan of operations. But any one knows that a good, genial dinner is a sort of pell-mell, indiscriminate affair, quite baffling to detail in all particulars. Thus, I spoke of taking a glass of claret, and a glass of sherry, and a glass of port, and a mug of ale—all at certain specific periods and times. But those were merely the state bumpers, so to speak. Innumerable impromptu glasses were drained between the periods of those grand imposing ones. (672)
By taking the positions of E. P. Thompson’s classic essay “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism” conversely, we might be able to contend that spendthrifts of time who occupy the precincts of leisure are themselves reflections of certain modern forms of social reification.8 Whereas the schedule of their gathering might have been regulated by a sense of decorum, it is precisely their position in the leisure class that allows them to abrogate the parameters of this would-be schedule, such that intervals of time remain irregular, instead calculated by “innumerable impromptu glasses.”
Melville had explored the relationship between temporality and space a few years earlier in his novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (1852), when the protagonist Pierre stumbles upon a pamphlet by Plinlimmon. While Plinlimmon delineates “chronometricals” from “horologicals” as the difference between the transcendent, heavenly, and timeless, on the one hand, and the material, earthly, and historical, on the other, his treatise on temporality is essentially engendered by an Orientalist, if not colonial or imperial, valence that situates England as the global epicenter.9 In the second half of the story, the narrator’s harkening back to London amounts to a kind of recursivity where the immediacy of the horological time of the factory is put into high relief by the chronometrical time of England.
The sheer presence, if not materiality, of “innumerable impromptu glasses” at the Inns of Court should be understood as another corollary of the bachelors’ very status as members of the leisure class.10 Having replaced their glorious tradition for one of less vigorous propensity, the men are enfeebled and decadent. But the multitudinous, nondescript glasses need to be thought of more closely as commodities, as the quotidian objects of everyday life where the relations of labor are altogether veiled, embodying Marx’s idea of the “social hieroglyphic.” If the “innumerable impromptu glasses” in the first half of the story exemplify a leisure and comfort well beyond the pale of utilitarian need and amount to one example of a utilitarian commodity in the first half of the story, Melville’s example in the second half of the diptych represents a different kind of “social hieroglyphic.” As he prepares to leave the factory and Devil’s Dungeon, the narrator puts his hands into “huge seal mittens” and wraps his body in “furs.” For Marx, engaging “social hieroglyphics” principally means being able to limn the human labor power or value necessarily entailed (but veiled or hidden) in work; or, as Latour will later write, “Parts hide one another; and when the artifact is completed the activity that fit them together disappears entirely” (Latour, 141). Here, however, the commodities of “seal mittens” and “furs” might instantiate an ecocritical iteration of the “social hieroglyphic,” a variation where the loss of natural life—not just human labor power or life—evinces the real costs of consumption, even consumption of basic necessities.
Early in the story, the narrator’s participation in various forms of consumption prompts him to announce, “We are a band of brothers,” and then to further consecrate their homosocial bond by sharing snuff (672). The Jericho horn is a different kind of object from the numberless nondescript glasses, cups, and mugs from which the men take their drinks inasmuch as its commodification is mediated several times over. From an orthodox Marxist perspective, the initial order of commodification would have occurred when the ore was converted into metal, followed by its transformation into a horn. Beyond the horn’s functional use value, its symbolic value is further adumbrated not only by the rich ornaments that adorn it but also by its ostensible “real” value as a ritualistic device. If it is a hieroglyph, it is one whose symbolic meaning is further reified through the theatricalized performance of its consumption.
While the Jericho horn scene has been variously interpreted as an erotic moment, it is also an important early example of the narrator misrecognizing an object or scenario as something else. During the first half at the Inns of Court, it is not the other bachelors who call it the “Jericho horn” but rather the narrator, who presumably is a rube from America learning English customs. Notwithstanding the irony of the narrator stating that he should introduce this “goodly fashion” among his “countrymen at home,” the scene anticipates other instances in the story where his confusion about object or scenario rebounds to a memory of his time at the Inns of Court (673).
Melville’s narrator comments upon this similitude when the pung being towed by his horse crashes at Devil’s Dungeon, compelling him to remember “being in a runaway London omnibus” (674). It occurs again after he dismounts from the box sleigh—“The inverted similitude recurred—‘The sweet, tranquil Temple garden, with the Thames bordering its green beds,’ strangely meditated I” (675). Strangely enough, the narrator attempts to rehabilitate the various disjunctions between the paradise of the bachelors and the maids’ hell to circumvent the feeling that Freud will later describe as “the uncanny.” He superimposes the manicured lawns of the bachelors’ perennially green gardens onto the austere paleness of a wintry wilderness where a “frost-painted” factory employs whitened women who produce white paper, exchanges the Blood River for the Isis, and fancies to see bachelors where there are only maids. The narrator wants a midsummer night’s dream, yet here is but a winter’s tale—“Though the two objects did by no means completely correspond, yet this partial inadequacy but served to tingle the similitude not less with the vividness than the disorder of a dream” (674).
The narrator’s cognitive “similitude” of associating the factory with the Temple Church accounts for his nominal bewilderment with not immediately seeing any men, reflecting to himself, “But where are the gay bachelors?” (675). There are no bachelors here, save one, the factory boss who is simply called “Old Bach,” whom the narrator learns of when he inquires if any bachelors’ buttons are ever found among the recycled shirts. The tour guide misinterprets the narrator’s question to be about the flowers, bachelor’s buttons. The episode instantiates another moment of the inverted similitude. But more important, it correlates the American boss of the New England factory as the displaced image of British aristocrats within the very precincts of the imagined constellation of the same homosocial network. Despite his own speculation that the structures are incongruent, he nonetheless expects to witness aristocratic men sauntering about the grounds—that is, he imagines them rematerializing in a setting and moment outside of the Inns of Court.
The resultant cross-references that are produced whenever the “inverted similitude” is invoked call attention not only to a predicament within hermeneutics but also to aesthetic questions concerning the formal properties of the story itself. This question is exacerbated because the thematic relation between the two parts remains unclear. Melville uses the “inverted similitude” to correlate seeming non sequiturs—such as the narrator’s purring of “Carry me back to old Virginny!”—while refusing to equate them as corresponding. The “inverted similitude” assumes the figurative physicality of a hinge that joins the panels of Melville’s diptych together. With this particular hinge, however, the two panels that make up “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” remain off-center. As a mode of reading, the diptych often has a sequential linearity. But in Melville’s version, as the story itself progresses, its undercurrent pulls the reader back to the previous sketch; its mode of reading might be front to back, but the story’s intricate resonances are only evinced back to front.
As much as Melville’s use of the “inverted similitude” reveals about the mechanics of interpretative acts in addition to the very form of the story as an objet d’art, it also needs to be understood as a cautionary tale on the ethics of translating a social order where Paradise and Tartarus are collapsed. The relationship of tautology and causality, returned to by Marx in his later writings, is underscored in Melville’s story through the ethereal and elongated lines of relation that compel the narrator to compare the two places again and again. Aesthetically and narratologically, the sequential quality of the diptych prompts an analysis of the ostensible English “superstructure” as the initial pathway to examining the would-be New England “base.” The trace presence of bachelors’ shirts from the first half that emerge in the second part, therefore, identifies less a mode of linear causality than a form of circulation and literalizes Marx’s theory of the “social hieroglyphic” as one that necessitates interrogating the latter to understand the former.
The narrator’s decision at the factory to purchase the paper complicates the base–superstructure equation by essentially depicting it in reverse and, more important, by extending it well beyond the domain of the local (or even the national) and mapping it onto a global scale. In this respect, Melville’s story needs to be read for the ways that it examines globalized capitalist production structurally. The purchasing of the paper, therefore, cannot be reduced to merely an iteration of a localized subjectivity but instead should be understood as an aspect of globalization that seemingly places a distant land ever-closer to home. The narrator’s position as an intermediary between these two sites discloses that while orthodox nationalism may be diminishing, the specific articulations and locations of its replacements are far from coincidental. His apprehension about the laboring women unveils a matrix of transnational exchange that disaggregates location from the strict precincts of the nation to produce alternative networks of affiliation that, for example, situate London, New York, Silicon Valley, and Hong Kong in greater propinquity than would the larger entailments of their respective countries themselves.11
While the bachelors in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” indulge in ritualistic hymn and song, the women at the paper mill enjoy no such leisure, partake in no gaieties, and indeed, do not even speak, moving instead to the cadences and rhythms of the machines. When the narrator finally stumbles into the factory, “one sweeping glance” of the place exposes countless women serving some type of machine. Highly discrete and compartmentalized, they work with such concentrated silence that “not a syllable was breathed” and nothing can be heard save the “overruling hum of the iron animals” (675). And then, in a reaction that recalls Henry David Thoreau’s assessment of railroads and anticipates the follies of overwound mechanization in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936), the narrator thinks to himself:
Machinery—that vaunted slave of humanity—here stood menially served by human beings, who served mutely and cringingly as the slave serves the Sultan. The girls did not so much seem accessory wheels to the general machinery as mere cogs to the wheels. (675)12
The narrator’s comparison of wage laborers to slaves is doubly mediated. The first association invokes the image of an exotic overlord of a distant land—indeed, of another epoch altogether.13 The machine produces a schism in the narrator’s understanding of temporality—rather than being the visual resonance of a futurity, the relationship of the women to the machine is described as anachronistic. Given the frequent discussions of racialized slavery at midcentury, Melville’s Harper’s New Monthly Magazine readership would most probably have at least momentarily recalled the condition of millions of enslaved blacks. The comparison was being widely disseminated, most prominently by George Fitzhugh but even by literary figures such as William Grayson, who published the poem “The Hireling and the Slave.”14 This attenuated reference is notable because, unlike The Piazza Tales, which have both “Benito Cereno” and one of the epigraphs of “The Bell-Tower” to put the reader in mind of enslaved blacks, the abjection of the women in “The Tartarus of Maids” is compounded by their ostensible mechanization as well as by their semblance to slaves.
Melville submits that, far from being the custodians of machines, humans could be reduced to mere appendages of them.15 The “unvarying punctuality” of the machine is also a sign of its “unbudging fatality” that marks the women as automatons—a condition that Marx notes will compel workers to adapt their “own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an automaton” (Capital, 546). Marx’s comments here in the factory section of Capital echo a point he had made earlier in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 about the dangers of workers being turned into machines. In Melville’s factory everything has a place, all the functions prescribed to such a degree that each worker need only assume her station, thereby making them not only interchangeable but replaceable—“Then, as I still looked, the two—for some small variety to the monotony—changed places; and where had stood the young, fair brow, now stood the ruled and wrinkled one” (675). The narrator thinks himself prey to some quixotic fancy, but the alacrity with which the women switch positions is no illusion, suggesting not only that they indeed are interchangeable but also that they have long been accustomed to being so.
Although the narrator is temporally dismayed at the sight of these women sitting in receptacles, “like so many mares haltered to the rack,” his dismay quickly dissipates as he concentrates on the origins of the rags being shredded for the paper (676). His curiosity is piqued when it is revealed that some of the blanched rags come “from far over sea—Leghorn and London” (676). The reference to Leghorn, or Livorno, a key port city on the Tyrrhenian Sea on the western edge of Tuscany, exposes a metaphorical substrate and adds another point on the transnational circuit. The narrator murmurs that perhaps “among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors” (676).
What might this act of shredding English rags to make American paper reflect about how commodities are read, and especially in relation to the question of the global and the local? In Melville’s tale, the female workers are depicted inhaling “poisonous particles” from the shredded rags (676). As dangerous as their transfiguration into machines might be, one of the foremost ills of capitalism in Marx’s estimation was the way it veiled the labor processes entailed in making any given commodity.
But in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville illustrates quite the opposite by having his narrator recognize the way the women are being enmeshed in the paper itself:
I stood spell-bound and wandering in my soul. Before my eyes—there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day. Slowly, mournfully, beseechingly, yet unresistingly, they gleamed along, their agony dimly outlined on the imperfect paper, like the print of the tormented face on the handkerchief of Saint Veronica. (678)
Far from being mystified or enjoying the benefits of being blissfully unaware, the narrator is viscerally aware that every piece of paper carries within it the agony of a human being. His acute awareness that the women here cannot be rendered intelligible by technology but instead must rely upon the analogy of transubstantiation as a proxy form of analysis. Melville’s repetition of the word “pallid” reiterates the ways in which the women are figuratively dissolved into the paper itself over and over.
In so doing, Melville disallows the modes of obfuscation and mystification engendered by the fetishization of commodities from concretizing. There is no puzzle here to decode, no need for someone to translate the “social hieroglyphic” of the paper. Instead of concealing the human labor that is otherwise camouflaged at the marketplace of exchange, Melville reinserts the subjective quality of labored drudgery at the very site of production in “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” It is almost as if Melville stalls the fetishization of the paper as a commodity here. The narrator’s allusion to Saint Veronica intimates the ways in which the women are being transubstantiated into the paper itself and reveals what Marx identified in Capital as the “mystical” and “enigmatic character of the product of labour” once it assumed the form of a commodity (164).
As much as Marx’s definition of alienation from the earlier 1844 manuscripts remains important as a quantitative notion of subtraction, it also needs to be understood as a qualitative marker of social difference, as a mode of transmogrification that threatens to alter the corporeal self of workers as nominative subjects within capitalist modes of production.16 The women are not just alienated from their labor in the strict Marxist sense, as in the forms of compulsory or even forced subtraction. Rather, they are historicized as aliens—as different beings and different social subjects—symbolized by the very inhalation of the rag particles, transfiguring the body as something less than human.
Melville records no sounds from the women, nothing to recover that would allow the narrator to recognize them as human beings trapped in and subsumed by the paper. Instead, Melville uses concise language and imagery to depict the way the women are dissolved into the paper—“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” (675). The women’s alabaster complexion not only serves to conflate them with the paper but translates their ghastly and ghostly positions as near synonyms. Georg Lukács will later call this—the first stage of Marx’s “transubstantiation”—“phantom-objectivity.”17 The white paper prompts the narrator to think of John Locke’s tabula rasa, but Marx’s idea of the “social hieroglyphic” nature of commodities is more pertinent, especially given the narrator’s wish to use the paper allocation for envelopes to effect his own business transactions.
Proceeding from the rag room, the seedsman-narrator thinks to himself that the women are rather like “state-prisoners,” condemned as such to a sentence of working to death (676). The metaphoric sentencing of the women in “The Tartarus of Maids” is not wholly dissimilar to the floating prison-house ship of captured Africans in the third selection of The Piazza Tales—in “Benito Cereno,” there is a vessel that, ironically, is recovered by no less than the Bachelor’s Delight.18 Although they would come to represent different ends of the labor spectrum, the sentence of “blue-collar” drudgery that condemns the Tartarus women was, in some respects, prefigured by the “white-collar” Bartleby, who starves to death in the Tombs. Leaving the factory at Devil’s Dungeon, his carriage well-supplied, the narrator is now prepared to distribute his seeds “throughout all the Eastern and Northern States, and even . . . into the far soil of Missouri and the Carolinas” enclosed in paper envelopes (674). Perhaps some of the foolscap from the factory will make its way slightly south to New York City, where Melville’s more notoriously alienated subject, Bartleby, will pick up the paper and better understand the women enmeshed therein than did our narrator; will, in a sense, be more capable of deciphering the “social hieroglyphic” of the paper—maybe it is this grander understanding that compels Bartleby to continually mumble, “I prefer not to.”19
The forms of objectification depicted in Melville’s story have only been further reified since the mid-nineteenth century—modes of reification that have systematically veiled the haunting spectrality of laborers by keeping them off-site and out-of-sight at the same moment that commodities themselves are conspicuously displayed with shiny effervescence. With this line of argumentation I have tried to suggest that the transformations of leisure and labor at the advent of the industrial revolution, depicted in Melville’s story, eventuated a disjunction between subjectivity and community and anticipated the dialectic between the global and the local.20 Approaching the question of how objects and things were being reconceptualized through a materialist approach—in terms of both formalist aesthetics and historical materialism relative to political economy—reframes exegesis not simply as a literary exercise but as a mode of social anthropology that reveals developments that would become genetic to late capitalism.
“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” evinces a reconfiguration in the global geography of labor where nations like the United States and England come to interact with one another via the economies of import and export trade through a constellation of cities such as Boston and London, while heavily concentrated labor remains out of sight in, say, Lowell and Liverpool. In ways that are all too accurate, the men are leisured, enfeebled, even lazy; the women toil. This new geography of labor shadows on a microscale the metropole–colony structure of international capitalist regimes.
If the locations that constitute the coordinates in the current global constellation of leisure and consumption, places like Melville’s “universal London,” are far from arbitrary, as Pheng Cheah has argued, then it is not altogether surprising that near the original setting of Melville’s story stands Kilgour, purveyor of fine clothing (671).21 Situated next to the makers of luxury shirts in Jermyn Street, Kilgour, like other tailors on Savile Row, has long been exalted for its custom suits and reputed for the dozens of hours of skilled labor required to make them. But Kilgour has adopted a practice more akin to what we have long associated with multinational corporations of outsourcing parts of its manufacturing cycle. Its entry-level bespoke suits, for example, are cut in London but shipped to Shanghai for part of the production process before they are returned to London for finishing.22 Although indeed many companies outsource, or in fact own satellite operations in multiple cities and countries, the production cycle of these Kilgour suits is a reminder that the metropole–colony dialectic of former imperial structures has been effectively, if not discretely, reasserted. Tucked away from the bustle of Piccadilly Circus, the area where Kilgour is located is historically where refined men of leisure and wealth congregated to recognize one another as equivalent subjects through a kind of affected bourgeois cosmopolitanism—a place whose ritualized decadence is not altogether different from that experienced by the narrator of Melville’s story.23
1. Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 10 (April 1855): 678. Future references to this work will be cited directly in text by page number in parentheses.
2. Wai Chee Dimock, “Class, Gender, and a History of Metonymy,” in Rethinking Class: Literary History and Social Formations, ed. Wai Chee Dimock and Michael T. Gilmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 79.
3. Bill Brown is the scholar most identified with thing-theory; see the special issue of Critical Inquiry 28, no. 1 (Autumn 2001) that he edited as well as his A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
4. I am influenced here by Arjun Appadurai, ed., The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
5. Bruno Latour, “Can We Get Our Materialism Back, Please?” Isis 98, no. 1 (2007): 141. Further citations in the text.
6. See Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990; originally published 1867), 74; and J. Hillis Miller, “Promises, Promises: Speech Act Theory, Literary Theory, and Politico-Economic Theory in Marx and de Man,” New Literary History 33, no. 1 (2002): 2. The classic statement on hieroglyphics in American literature remains John T. Irwin’s American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
7. Herman Melville, The Writings of Herman Melville, vol. 15, Journals, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1989), 321.
8. As Thompson writes, “It is too easy, however, to see this only as a matter of factory or workshop discipline, and we may glance briefly at the attempt to impose ‘time-thrift’ in the domestic manufacturing districts, and its impingement upon social and domestic life.” E. P. Thompson, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past and Present 38 (December 1967): 83.
9. “But though the chronometer carried from Greenwich to China, should truly exhibit in China what the time may be at Greenwich at any moment; yet, though thereby it must necessarily contradict China time, it does by no means thence follow, that with respect to China, the China watches are at all out of the way. Precisely the reverse. For the fact of that variance is a presumption that, with respect to China, the Chinese watches must be all right; and consequently as the China watches are right as to China, so the Greenwich chronometers must be wrong as to China. Besides, of what use to the Chinaman would a Greenwich chronometer, keeping Greenwich time, be? Were he thereby to regulate his daily actions, he would be guilty of all manner of absurdities:—going to bed at noon, say, when his neighbors would be sitting down to dinner. And thus, though the earthly wisdom of man be heavenly folly to God; so also, conversely, is the heavenly wisdom of God an earthly folly to man. Literally speaking, this is so. Nor does the God at the heavenly Greenwich expect common men to keep Greenwich wisdom in this remote Chinese world of ours; because such a thing were unprofitable for them here, and, indeed, a falsification of Himself, inasmuch as in that case, China time would be identical with Greenwich time, which would make Greenwich time wrong.” Herman Melville, Pierre; or, The Ambiguities (Evanston: Northwestern University Press; Chicago: Newberry Library, 1971; originally published 1852), 212.
10. See W. R. Thompson, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids: A Reinterpretation,” American Quarterly 9, no. 1 (Spring 1957): 39; Robyn Wiegman, “Melville’s Geography of Gender,” American Literary History 1, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 740. Beryl Rowland and Philip Young remain ambivalent about the horn as a specific sexual allegory. See Beryl Rowland, “Melville’s Bachelors and Maids: Interpretation through Symbol and Metaphor,” American Literature 41, no. 3 (November 1969): 397; and Philip Young, “The Machine in Tartarus: Melville’s Inferno,” American Literature 63, no. 2 (June 1991): 209.
11. On the topic of global networks see Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacy of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015) and Christopher Taylor’s Empire of Neglect: The West Indies in the Wake of British Liberalism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2018), as well as the foundational work of Immanuel Wallerstein, especially, The Modern World System (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
12. As Thoreau understood it, “We do not ride upon the railroad, it rides upon us.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods (New York: Signet Classic, 1960; originally published 1854), 67.
13. Recalling the underpinnings of Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978), noting the oblique allusions to the Sahara, the Euphrates, and “the Oriental manuscripts” in the first half only heightens the references in the second to the Sultan and to the machine as being mysterious “like some long Eastern manuscript” and thereby collates the two halves of Melville’s story with the same discursive logic (676). These Orientalist tropes are fundamental to an understanding of the story.
14. See George Fitzhugh’s Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters (Richmond, Va.: A. Morris, 1857).
15. Here Melville more aptly anticipates Herbert Marcuse’s contention that the previous association of metaphysics as the litmus of one’s subjectivity was being superseded by technology. See Marcuse, “From Ontology to Technology: Fundamental Tendencies of Industrial Society,” in Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Emancipation, vol. 5 of Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, ed. Douglass Kellner and Clayton Pierce (London: Routledge, 2011), 132–40.
16. For Marx, estrangement alienated the worker in four ways: from one’s products, from the activity of labor itself, from nature, and from one’s species. In one of the best-known passages from the 1844 manuscripts, Marx writes, “This relationship is the relationship of the worker to his own activity as an alien activity not belonging to him; it is activity as suffering, strength as weakness, begetting as emasculating, the worker’s own physical and mental energy, his personal life—for what is life but activity?—as an activity which is turned against him, independent of him and not belonging to him. Here we have self-estrangement, as previously we had the estrangement of the thing”; see Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1961), 73.
17. See Marx, Capital, 203. In reiterating Marx, Georg Lukács writes, “The essence of the commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom-objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.” Lukács, History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994), 84. But, as I emphasize, “The Tartarus of Maids” continually reveals this very relation between people through what Latour calls the “exploded-view principle of description” (Latour, 141).
18. As W. R. Thompson notes, “The bachelors and the master of the San Dominick are thus more nearly juxtaposed than at first appears; as a matter of fact, they represent two facets of the same civilization” (“A Reinterpretation,” 44).
19. Indeed, Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener” provides an interesting point of comparison to “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” and the question of labor. Beyond the reference to hieroglyphics, Melville compares the Tombs (i.e., Wall Street) to ancient Egypt and, by extension, Bartleby to the ancient slaves of Egypt. Furthermore, Melville concludes “Bartleby” with a similar syntactical construction of paralleled exclamations.
20. Stuart Hall has articulated this interrelation with critical insight; see Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity, ed. Anthony D. King (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 19–40.
21. As Pheng Cheah has noted, because the “rearticulations of national culture are induced by and given from within a global field of economic and political forces, they are clearly not instances of a cultural agency that is unmoored or relatively independent from material forces.” Pheng Cheah, “Given Culture: Rethinking Cosmopolitical Freedom in Transnationalism,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 314.
22. Kilgour recently noted in its online advertising, “Handmade bespoke clothes at more competitive prices. Customers are measured in the fitting rooms at 8 Saville Row and garments are cut on site. They are then sent out to be basted and returned for finishing and fitting” (http://www.kilgour.eu/bespoke/entrylevel/). Important too for my argument about the relationship between contemporary forms of reification, commodity fetishism, and the social hieroglyphic is that Kilgour makes no mention of the fact that Shanghai is the site to which these suits are “sent out,” as if the location should remain ethereal rather than specific.
23. Gieves and Hawkes, one of Kilgour’s neighbors, recently noted in its online advertising, “Today, the same man, or woman, may be having lunch in Tokyo, dinner in London and breakfast in New York, and live life at a fast and furious pace” (http://www.gievesandhawkes.com/en/tailoring/bespoke/the-art-of/).