The Metaphorical Meaning of Industrialism in Herman Melville's The Tartarus of Maids

In the short tale "The Tartarus of Maids," author Herman Melville portrays a world completely mastered by machinery. As he describes the paper mill which churns out its product: "Nothing was heard but the low, steady overruling hum of the iron animals" (215). All human life is subjugated to the production of this "iron animal." The machinery in the paper mill factory becomes both an instrument that creates life and destroys it at once.

Melville's allegory of the impact of Industrialism on humanity is given breadth and feeling through its metaphorical and imagistic implications. Melville uses the factory and its machinery as a human womb that produces products that keep men like its narrator well employed and wealthy, while stealing the very lives and souls of the women who keep the machinery well-oiled. The imagery feeds on the metaphorical ideas of birth, life, death, and production.

In the story, the industrial machinery which governs the lives of the women who keep it running has qualities that are not dissimilar to that of human reproduction. Melville uses a number metaphorical signifiers which suggest a relationship between the machinery of industrialism and the labor of childbirth. The first indication of this comes with a sly nod toward the menstrual cycle. When the narrator travels to the Devil's Dungeon, the valley in which the paper mill exists, he notices that the currents running through the hollow is called Blood River because of its brick-color consistency. When the narrator is taken to the room where the machinery is actually kept, it is described as having a "stifling [with a] strange, blood-like abdominal heat" (218).

Again, machinery is given attributes similar to a woman's biological function. The machinery's attribution to childbirth is revealed in the elderly nurse who sits at the machine-end, catching each sheet of paper as it is being spat out. The woman is described as a former nurse, but, as Cupid, the young man who leads the narrator on a tour of the mill, states: "'But the business is poor in these parts, and she's left it" (220). It seems inconceivable that the "business" of a nurse would be poor in any parts, especially since the mill does not lend itself to safe and healthy working conditions for the women who work there. Therefore, one must conclude that this nurse is actually a former mid-wife.

The fact that the women themselves are "maidens" and are not expected to have children would suggest why the "business" is so slow in those parts. Here, the implications are fascinating because they suggest the invasive totality industrialism has on the functions of women. No longer needed for childbirth, women serve the reproductive interests of industry.

The narrator's comparison of the individualistic potentiality of paper to John Locke's comparison of "the human mind at birth to a sheet of blank paper; something destined to be scribbled on..." (221) lends a chilling aspect to this reading. Rather than comparing humanity to a sheet of blank paper, Melville goes further and reveals that the sheet of paper has now taken on the quality of humanity. The narrator senses this when he states:

Something of awe now stole over me, as I gazed upon this inflexible iron animal. Always, more or less, machinery of this ponderous, elaborate sort strikes, in some moods, strange dread into the human heart, as some living, panting Behemoth might. But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. (221)

The fatality with which the narrator glimpses is his own. Humanity, enslaved by this "inflexible master," suffers with its own death.

If industry has now replaced the reproductive functions, what then becomes of man (or woman)? Melville answers this question metaphorically through the women who are enslaved by this machinery. The description of the women laborers is bleak, bearing reference to Locke's paper analogy: "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" (215). The parallel between the girls and the paper is suggestive, yet there is a gnawing apprehension within this brief passage. Unlike the paper, which has the potential to become "sermons, lawyers' briefs, physicians' prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on..." (220), there is no such potential hope for the girls.

This is already apparent by the fact that they are referred to as girls. Unable and incapable of becoming women because of their enslavement to industry, they must forever be "girls," that is, they will never reach maturity as defined by nineteenth century standards: marriage and motherhood. Without the ability to reproduce, death becomes the ultimate consequence.

Death figures prominently in many of the metaphorical images Melville plants throughout the story, an ironic implication since many of these images are also attributed to the machinery. The paper mill itself is located in a hollow called The Devil's Dungeon, giving it the impression of a Hades-like environment. Other metaphors alluding to death include "a Dantean gateway," "rude wooded ruin" (211) and "[t]he mountains stood pinned in shrouds-a pass of Alpine corpses" (213) in reference to the area surrounding the paper-mill. When the narrator reaches the paper-mill, a "violent blast, dead from behind," stuns him (212).

The paper-mill itself is routinely described as a sepulchre, a place where the dead are interred (214). Melville also alludes to the dangers the paper-mill has potentially on its workers: "The air swam with the fine, poisonous particles, which form all sides darted, subtilely, as motes in sunbeams, into the lungs" (217). While Cupid assures the narrator that the girls are "used to it," the fact that both he and the narrator cough themselves suggests the dangers implied. The narrator himself observes that the women, while sharpening the blade of the scythe which cuts up the white paper, are "[T]heir own executioners; themselves whetting the very swords that slay them" (218).

Here, the metaphor has come full circle. While industrialism has given birth to a new form of economic power and prowess, it has at the same time destroyed the very lives which keep it well-oiled. The girls themselves, ironically, are complicit in their own destruction, but they are, in the end, "mere cogs to the wheels" of industry (216). They are caught up in a system which not only demands their labor, but their childlessness and deaths to keep it reproductively sound.

While the women themselves are defined in fatalistic terms, the few men who appear in the story are the exact opposites. Unlike the women, who are "cogs in the machine," the men appear to be healthy and unaffected. The first male outside the narrator who appears in the story is "dark-complexioned" (216), as opposed to the pale-cheeked girls who work there. Cupid, the young tour guide, is also decribed in healthy tones: 'Cupid!' and by this odd fancy-name calling a dimpled, red-cheeked, spirit-looking, forward little fellow, who was rather impudently, I thought, gliding about among the passive-looking girls-like a gold-fish through hueless waves-yet doing nothing in particular that I could see..." (ibid.) The name-taken from the Greek god of love-and his description as a "gold-fish," suggest lively, colorful, and endearing qualities.

But these qualities also reveal a callousness in comparison to the rough and potentially dangerous environment in which the girls must work. When the narrator asks why the girls look so pale, Cupid's response ("-with a roguish twinkle, pure ignorant drollery, not knowing heartlessness-") prompts the narrator to regard the tragedy of the situation: "More tragical and more inscrutably mysterious than any mystic sight, human or machine, throughout the factory, was the strange innocence of cruel-heartedness in this usage-hardened boy" (218). The "strange innocence" reveals the complicity the boy bears in the working conditions which industrialism must demand for its consistent output.

While the "Tartarus of Maids" is a complete story in itself, it is actually the second part of a previous sketch called "The Paradise of Bachelors." In this story, the same narrator remarks on the magnificent insularity of a group of male elites who take in the sensual pleasures of food, wine, and conversations. The narrator mentions the Temple Church, in which the Bachelors meet, in contrast to the paper-mill: "...[I] saw the long, high-gabled main edifice, with a rude tower-for hoisting heavy boxes-at one end, standing among its crowded outbuildings and boarding houses, as the Temple Church amidst the surrounding offices and dormitories...and I said to myself, 'This is the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon and frost-painted to a sepulchre" (214).

Here, Melville is explicitly revealing the complicity between the Bachelors' high-living and the engine which feeds it. It is not accidental that the owner of the factory is also a Bach, as Cupid reveals to the narrator. There are various layers of implications here which suggest that modern industry, which serves the interests of men, has usurped the very biological, reproductive functions of women, while devaluing the women even as they labor to ensure the efficacy of that system. But Melville also reveals an even deeper reality: the Temple Church, where the Bachelors worship their way of life, like the "frost-painted sepulchre" that is the factory, anticipates the death of humanity.

There is an ironic note in the paper itself. Given the freedom for self-definition, it is still yet a production of human industry. Behind all those potential "scribblings," is the face of human interaction, interactions that are no doubt fostered by such elite clubs as The Paradise of Bachelors. Therefore, the destruction of human reproduction through industry abets the production of human interactions and back again, a neverending circle that, like the snake which swallows its own tail, feeds upon itself. The narrator mediates on this at the end of the story as he exclaims-"Oh! Paradise of Bachelors! and oh! Tartarus of Maids!"