Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener is one of the texts that is open to unlimited interpretations as can be realized through the countless pages written on the story to link the loose ends, that Melville presumably left on purpose, to some theory. Bartleby is a character that is not easy to reflect upon but how Melville uses the language to position Bartleby in the environment he exists and the setting of 1850’s New York provide the necessary tools for an analysis that will be undertaken below. As far as the economic environment that the story takes place is concerned, the analysis will follow the path to position Bartleby and the narrator as representatives of different classes and argue how the definitive lines separating those classes collide with regard to the development of the relation between Bartleby and the lawyer, and how the story still ends with the preservation of those lines.
To serve as a basis for the argument it will be appropriate first to touch upon the advancements in the capitalist economy of 1850’s New York and how the effects of these changes in the work place are reflected in Melville’s text. In 1850’s America, especially New York, capitalism is in its rapidly growing state bringing the need for the necessary changes to evolve through its maturity. These changes are plainly the physical changes in the working place as a response to the changes in the role of labor and capital. What is the nature of capitalism is that capital takes the control over the labor and uses that control to exploit the means of labor to the extent that is possible. Capital becomes the valuable asset explaining the change in the focus of the economic system from labor intensive markets to the financial sector. Wall Street even by that time becomes the symbol of this change as the new emerging finance center of the world. The image it creates fits perfectly to the needs of the capital system with all its high buildings separated into little booths that the divided labor who works as machines in order to specialize for the highest level of efficiency. The work place is now another reality for the workers that it separates them from their usual living space. These little offices become even more separated within themselves with additional glass doors, lessening the employer-employee relations and forcing the increase in the gap between classes. Under those circumstances, in 1850’s, workers protest the working conditions that require more of their energy with less returns and big demonstrations take place in New York to pull attention to the unequal distribution of income and workers insist upon their God-given right to land and the full value of their labor. As the Industrial Congress declared in 1851:
all men are created equal…they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among which are the right to Life, Liberty, and the fruits of their Labor, and to the use of such a portion of the earth and other elements as are necessary for their subsistence and comfort.[1]
In such an environment where the labor and the capital system is the issue of zealous discussions, Melville, also being sensitive on the issue, reflects the realities of his era through the lawyer’s narration in his text Bartleby, the Scrivener. What Melville offers the reader is the viewpoint of an upper-middle class lawyer on the physical transition that the city is experiencing as a result of the accelerated evolving of the economic system. How the lawyer describes his office as a contrast of two opposing sights can be read as a metaphor to that transition:
My chambers were up stairs…At one end they looked upon the white wall of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom. This view might have been considered…deficient in what painters call “life”. But if so, the view from the other end of my chambers offered, at least, a contrast, if nothing more. In that direction my windows commanded an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade; which wall required no spy-glass to bring out its lurking beauties, but for the benefit of all near-sighted spectators, was pushed up to within ten feet of my window panes.[2]
As well as describing the capitalist vision of the era with this passage, Melville gives clues about the personality of the narrator. The reader derives the sense of a crash in the emotions of the lawyer while acknowledging his appreciation towards the new sight of the interior of a spacious sky-light shaft, penetrating the building from top to bottom as in collision with the value he puts into the beauties of the old. This conflict that the narrator is experiencing adds a degree of depth in his character. Later on in the story, this conflict will form the ground for his interaction with Bartleby, which will also be the main focus of the analysis here. But before proceeding with that aspect of the analysis, it will be useful to look for the causes of the conflict based on Marx’s Theory of Class Struggle.
A Marxist approach to the text in question would allow such an observation of the characters as representatives of different classes. The lawyer, as he describes himself in the first pages of the text, functions on the ruling side of the society, who owns a certain amount of property, but he adds that he is not eager as his colleagues to possess more than he has since he is an ordinary elderly man. He informs the reader about his admiration towards John Jacob Astor, the later millionaire of the Astor family who is famous in his capitalist returns in fur trading and real estate, but he also says that he is on the side of easy life, implying that he is not a strong advocate of ideas and supports the one that provides him an easier life. In that respect, with regard to Marx, the lawyer can be seen a representative of the bourgeois, but rather with a conformist approach. Marx explains this adjustment to a particular class in The German Ideology;
the class in its turn achieves an independent existence over against the individuals, so that the latter find their conditions of existence predestined, and hence have their position in life and their personal development assigned to them by their class, become subsumed under it. [3]
And he continues with the suggestion that private property and labor should be abolished in order to break the barriers of classes. Later in Melville’s text, the confrontation of the lawyer with Bartleby, who refuses to put his labor into work, can be seen as a minor case study for Marx’s expectations on the abolishment of labor. It is important to note how the lawyer positions himself within the conventions of the capitalist system to understand the effect of that confrontation on both sides, especially on the narrator’s part.
As explained above, the lawyer’s thoughts and behavior is comfortably shaped by the adopted beliefs of the class he belongs to and he internalizes those beliefs not consciously but as elements in the preconscious mental framework that constitutes his sense of reality. The lawyer sees the hierarchical distribution of labor in his office, which relegates the clerks to copying the documents and promptly responding to his requests, as a natural setting. In other words, although it is a social construct deriving from an economic system that invests employers with power over their wage-dependent employees to some extent, and since he is on the side which has the power, he identifies his authority with the natural order as if its exercise is a given natural contract and it should be applied on his employees whereas he also places himself in this framework in a position unlike his employees that he does not have to please an immediate superior, but in order to insure the success of his practice he must prove himself to be a responsible businessman who conforms to the accepted practices and values of his profession. Marx analyzes this kind of framework under the terms of utilitarianism;
this is actually the case with bourgeois. For him only one relation is valid on its own account—the relation of exploitation; all other relations have validity for him only insofar as he can include them under this one relation, and even where he encounters relations which cannot be directly subordinated to the relation of exploitation, he does at least subordinate them to it in his imagination.[4]
Thus Bartleby’s refusals strike him not as acts of resistance to an unjust subordination but as ‘violently unreasonable’[5], whereas he assumes his own behavior when he requests additional things as being ‘perfectly reasonable’[6]. He places Bartleby inside his office behind a high screen so that the scrivener may be hidden from view and yet “within easy call, in case any trifling thing was to be done”[7]. On the third day of Bartleby’s employment, the lawyer relates how he “abruptly called to Bartleby” in “natural expectancy of instant compliance”[8]. It is in response to this abrupt call that Bartleby issues his first “I would prefer not to”[9].
Bartleby’s never clearly explained reaction towards the lawyer’s calls and the silent conflict that arises between the lawyer and Bartleby can be interpreted in a Marxist framework based on Marx’s ideas on the ‘private interest’ and the ‘general interests’ of the members of a class. Bartleby can be seen as a representative of the proletariat in the story, and his action to stop working matches with Marx’s ideas on the abolition of labor:
For the proletarians…the condition of their existence, labor, and with all the conditions of existence governing modern society, have become something accidental, something over which they, as separate individuals, have no control, and over which no social organization can give them control. The contradiction between the individuality of each separate proletarian and labor, the condition of life forced upon him, becomes evident to him himself, for he is sacrificed from youth upwards and, within his own class, has no chance of arriving at the conditions which would place him in the other class. Thus, while the refugee serfs only wished to be free to develop and assert those conditions of existence which were already there, and hence, in the end, only arrived at free labor, the proletarians, if they are to assert themselves as individuals, will have to abolish the very conditions of their existence hitherto…namely, labor.[10]
He explains how the process, that takes the proletariat to the point of the abolishment of his labor, works in terms of the ‘general interest’ becoming alien to proletariat’s ‘individual interest’, since the general interest is meant to reflect the interest of the ruling class:
Just because individuals seek only their particular interest, which for them does not coincide with their communal interest (in fact the general is the illusory form of communal life), the latter will be imposed on them as an interest “alien” to them, and “independent” of them as in its turn a particular, peculiar “general” interest; or they themselves must remain within this discord, as in democracy.[11]
One last quote from Marx is necessary to link the standpoint of Bartleby in his relation to the lawyer, in order to clarify the point where they get stuck in this conflict based on the loss of control on their “will”:
The material life of individuals, which by no means depends merely on their “will”, their mode of production and form of intercourse, which mutually determine each other—this is the real basis of the State and remains so at all the stages at which division of labor and private property are still necessary, quite independently of the will of individuals. These actual relations are in no way created by the State power; on the contrary they are the power creating it. The individuals who rule in these conditions, besides having to constitute their power in the form the State, have to give their will, which is determined by these definite conditions, a universal expression whose content is always determined by the relations of this class, as the civil and criminal law demonstrates in the clearest possible way…the same applies to the classes which are ruled, whose will plays just as small a part in determining the existence of law and the State.[12]
It is now possible to work with Marx’s ideas on the loss of will and the abolishment of labor and how do they apply to Bartleby’s case by focusing on the relationship that develops between Bartleby and the lawyer after the conflict arises. For the lawyer, it can be argued that property rights supersede the other rights, including equality and the rights to privacy and material necessities. Upon discovering that Bartleby is homeless and lives in the office, the lawyer justifies himself, based on his property rights, in violating Bartleby’s privacy by unlocking his desk in search of personal information. He tells himself, because “the desk is mine, and its contents too”.[13] Similarly he again asserts his property rights over Bartleby’s need for shelter and security: “What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?”[14] Although, he claims he feels compassion towards Bartleby, these are the moments he loses his temper based on his strong commissions for the private property laws. But still he cannot reflect all his beliefs unto Bartleby and he cannot come up with the proper solution to the situation because Bartleby is able to carry a limited dialogue with him within the same language that is specific to the lawyer’s class. Bartleby does not give him an acceptable reason for his actions but he also uses a language that is familiar to the lawyer when he responds to Bartleby’s actions with a carefully controlled language. One of his attempts to find a solution for Bartleby’s situation is again refused by Bartleby very kindly and with a carefully built language. He offers to help Bartleby find a new employment in different positions such as a companionship for a young gentleman traveling in Europe, and Bartleby declines all of his offers saying “I am not particular.”[15]One reason for Bartleby saying that he is not particular may be that he is not particular about the work he does. His dissatisfaction is not with the work environment or the nature of the work but with the employer-employee relationship.
As a final analysis, the emotional development of the relationship between Bartleby and the lawyer will lead the way to the solution or dissolution of the conflict they are experiencing. Although the representation of the lawyer above may appear as him being an uncaring capitalist, it should be noted that he is in many respects an extraordinarily patient and sensitive man towards Bartleby. The image of the lawyer created by Melville with that aspect then turns into a lost character between the tension caused by the capitalist concern to maximize his economic interest and his Christian morality to love one’s neighbor. To keep a balance between the two sides of his personality, the lawyer needs to justify his actions with some kind of an approval that comes from the both sides. A good example for his conflict in this sense is when he assumes that Bartleby is not copying anymore because he has damaged his eyes. The Christian part of his character does not want to fire him because as he expresses himself he feels pity towards Bartleby’s miserable condition, but since he is a capitalist and each moment that Bartleby is not working will return him as a loss of profit he needs to justify the action he takes in not firing Bartleby by believing that he is sick and this situation will last only until he recovers.
Bartleby is not an explicit revolutionist instead his approach to the conflict is a more self-concerned resistance. That is why he also conditions his responses according to the lawyer’s actions, based not on a determined social activism but rather on a search for a more intimate relationship for his work and his being. Although he is very keen on not reflecting emotions, it is still possible to observe the signs of relaxing his personal resistance in response to the possible change in the lawyer’s approach to him. In the passage where the lawyer tries to get to know Bartleby in order to understand the reason for his resistance, he says “But what reasonable objection can you have to speak to me? I feel friendly towards you.” Bartleby hesitates in maintaining his usual passivity as can be understood from the narrator’s observations on Bartleby: “the faintest conceivable tremor of the white attenuated mouth” and replies “At present I prefer to give no answer”[16]. The emphasis on ‘at present’ here faintly implies that he may become more cooperative in the future depending on the continuity of the lawyer’s friendly approach to him. In other words, Bartleby is open to change but cautiously awaits further evidence of a genuine transformation on the lawyer.
The shift in Bartleby’s responses towards the lawyer’s actions occurs when Bartleby realizes that the expectations he had regarding the lawyer’s ability to understand him will not become true and he consciously chooses death after being sent to the prison while ignoring the lawyer’s attempts to contact him. The underlying reason for such an ending could be that Bartleby’s resistance only reached the surface of the lawyer’s consciousness towards his duties to the society he is living in, meaning that Bartleby’s resistance only evoked the sense of compassion in the lawyer. But the desired effect to be seen in the other by Bartleby’s resistance could be to create awareness in the other and receive back a response of intellectual honesty, imagination and courage to respond to the demands of justice.
[1] Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), p.383.
[2] Melville, The Piazza Tales, p.14.
[3] Marx-Engels, The German Ideology, p. 82.
[4] The German Ideology, p. 110.
[5] Melville, The Piazza Tales, p.22.
[6] The Piazza Tales, p.25.
[7] The Piazza Tales, p.19
[8] p.20
[9] p. 20
[10] Marx-Engels, The German Ideology, p.85
[11] Marx-Engels, The German Ideology, p.53
[12] The German Ideology, p.106
[13] Melville, The Piazza Tales, p.28
[14] Melville, The Piazza Tales, p.35
[15] The Piazza Tales, p.41
[16] Melville, The Piazza Tales, p. 30
