"The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids": Melville's Inversion of Emersonian Optimism
Abstract
Even though critics have recognized anti-Emersonian satire in three of Melville's later works written in the 1854-1857 period--"Poor Man 1 s Pudding and Rich Man 1 s Crumbs," Benito Cereno, and The Confidence~-- nobody has approached the remaining story from this period, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," from this predominantly philosophical point of view. In this study, I have attempted to show that this story may be read as a unified, coherent inversion of Emerson's optimistic world view. I have centered my approach basically around a comparison of Emerson's philosophies with the "reality" of the worlds of the bachelors and the maids, culminating in Melville's satiric use of Emerson's "supernatural eyeball" symbol. Important to this study is an examination of Melville 1 s "bachelor" motif which recurs in many of his works but seems to be most fully developed in Benito Cereno and "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids."
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- OSU Theses [15752]