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How Mechanization Takes Command In Melville’s “The Tartarus Of Maids”

Melville’s story “The Tartarus of Maids,” juxtaposes the two short stories in a way that is similar to Blake’s poems with their theme of balance. Both stories have themes of mechanization and modernization. First, there is little technology or mechanical influence. The earthly and carnal body is too dominant. The Tartarus of Maids, the hellish life of an average maid, however, is controlled by machines. Melville creates the hell of a world where machines are in control of the lives, and not women. She does this in order to warn people about the danger of being slaves to machines. Melville uses cold, white, and paper as a symbol of this loss in humanity and path to blankness.

Melville’s story is set in high mountains covered with snow and cold. Bach (286) says that it’s no accident that the paper mill is located in a place “so cold you would not believe it today, but even colder than the top of Woedolor mountain”. The names given to places reflect this feeling of despair and the coldness. The mountain’s title includes the word “woe,” the river’s is “Blood River,” the valley’s of the mill is “Devil’s Dungeon.” These names immediately evoke a sense foreboding and evil. Melville once more foreshadows horror. Melville also foreshadows the horror of the story through the weather as he travels to the mill. The narrator writes that plants and trees “feel the same all stiffening influence” (273). The reader is left feeling uneasy by this “coldness” that appears to be just cold weather. It seems that the cold is unnatural, and a bit too cold for what was forecast. The narrator goes on to describe the wind shrieking like it was “laden with lost spirit bound for an unhappy world” (273) Readers should be on the lookout for shrieking winds or lost spirits. If the wind is sad or supernatural-sounding, then we know something is amiss. The first glimpse of the paper mill itself is after “a pass of Alpine bodies” when “suddenly an humming, whirring noise” alerts to the site (274). The paper-mill is the only thing that is alive in the area. It’s no more alive that the dead mountain scenery or cold scenery. The paper-mill, according to the narrator, is “‘the very equivalent of the Paradise of Bachelors’, but with snow on it and frost painted like a grave” (275). Snow on the paper-mill represents the death and coldness associated with its machinery. He does not describe the place as a grave covered with snow and ice by accident. The paper mill’s very construction brings to mind thoughts of coldness, loneliness, and death.

All the people in the paper mill, except for two men, are as cold and dead as the snowy setting. They reflect the white papers they make. The first person he meets, a girl named “blue”, has a “supernatural eye” that is filled with “unrelated misery”. (276). The girl’s cold is accompanied by unhappiness, and she is as miserable and cold as the mountain winds. Melville implies the paper-mill’s machinery steals girls’ lives. The connection between the blank paper with the blank girls in the passage is highlighted ruthlessly. “At blank-looking desks sat blank-looking women, holding blank white folders and folding blank paper.” (277). The narrator observes that while the machine produces a red-colored paper, the cheeks of girls are white. The narrator notices that the machine makes red paper, but the cheeks of the girls are white. We can see the same theme in relation to Blood River.

Blood is the color of life and humanity. It gives our skin its color and represents passion and anger, which are the highest human emotions. However, the girls appear pale when the blood-red river is flowing into the newspaper. Ironically Blood River turns the wheel which “‘sets entire machinery a going'”(280). The machine is run by the river, not by humans. The narrator stumbles, saying that it’s unusual for “red water to produce pale paper” (279). He was referring to the paler cheeks, not the pale paper. However, it symbolizes the reversal nature of a paper mill. Machines kill humans and humans kill machines. Melville’s passage, “The voice of humanity was banished” explains their relationship. Humans served the machine, which is the praised slave of humanity. This was done in a mute and miserable manner. The girls… are mere cogs” (277-8). Humans serve machines instead of the reverse. The machines were designed to simplify and improve the lives of humans, but they have been used to sell our souls. They are not only using paper to “feed the animal iron”, they also use other materials. It is alive because of the comparison between the machine and an animal. It’s not just “a machine” (283).

Melville appears to be most horrified by Melville’s human submission. The narrator explains, “Always…more or less…machinery… strikes, in some moods…a strange dread into human hearts…But I found the thing which I saw to be particularly horrifying because of its metallic necessity…the unbudgeable fate that governed. The narrator cannot accept the human attitude towards this monstrosity.

The narrator says that the girls are “their executioners. They themselves are sharpening their own swords” (281). They are their executioners because the machines that drain their lives from them make them do it willingly. The symbolic meaning is evident when we read “At the pale incipience, all the pallid girl’s faces… slowly, mournfully… yet unresistingly they gleamed on” (285). The white paper is now etched with their faces. Their faces are now imprinted on the white paper. The machine takes everything from them and they become nothing more that the paper it produces. The narrator says, “my journeys were over, because here was the end” (283). This line is a little disturbing. John Locke said that the human mind is “a blank page at birth” (283). If so, then the blank pages of paper suggest death. The girls go out as they came in: blank pieces of paper.

The narrator’s face is a visual and symbolic indicator of the plot. They are a symbol of the beginning, the middle and the end. The story ends with them. His cheeks were frozen when he arrived and need to be revived. His cheeks are fine after he leaves Devil’s Dungeon. The machine drains his life from his cheeks. To save his cheeks, he must leave the machine. Our narrator has escaped, but how about the girls who are trapped inside?

Author

  • milesmitchell12

    Miles Mitchell is a 40-year-old educational blogger and professor. He has been writing about education and education-related topics since he was a teenager, and has since become one of the leading voices in the education industry. Mitchell is a regular contributor to many education-related websites, including The Huffington Post and The Daily Caller, and has been teaching college students and professionals alike how to write, think, and learn in an education-related setting for over 10 years.

milesmitchell12

Miles Mitchell is a 40-year-old educational blogger and professor. He has been writing about education and education-related topics since he was a teenager, and has since become one of the leading voices in the education industry. Mitchell is a regular contributor to many education-related websites, including The Huffington Post and The Daily Caller, and has been teaching college students and professionals alike how to write, think, and learn in an education-related setting for over 10 years.