Upon reading Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” I naturally noticed the direct contrasts between the two accounts: “Paradise (Heaven)” vs. “Tartarus (Hell);” “Bachelors” vs. “Maids;” London versus New England; etc. 

Upon first glance, the titles of the collaborative short stories suggest that England represents a paradise, or heaven, whereas America represents hell. This conclusion is further supported by the potentially symbolic physical dwellings described in each account: The bachelors of paradise dine in an “apartment…well up toward heaven” (1498), which stands in stark juxtaposition to the “great, purple, hopper-shaped…hollow…called the Devil’s Dungeon” (1502) that contains the maids’ paper mill. Following this line of reason, the bachelors indulge in lavish meals, an abundance of alcohol, splendid stories of their pasts, and embrace the narrator with “warm hearts and warmer welcomes” (1497). This appears to be a rather heavenly existence! On the other hand, the maids working at the paper mill greet the narrator “pale with work, and blue with cold; an eye supernatural with unrelated misery” (1505). They spend their days inhaling toxic fumes and monotonously feeding machines that they come to resemble themselves. The reader certainly recognizes this as hellish.

However, a reflection on the two dwellings reveals that the Bachelors of Paradise live in an ivory tower of ignorance, isolated from the rest of the world. The narrator goes so far as to speculate that “pain” and “trouble…seemed preposterous to their bachelor imaginations” (1501). Despite the light tone and apparent admiration of the narrator regarding the Paradise of Bachelors, Melville certainly seems to be sending a critical message of their sluggish, hedonistic lifestyle. The Maids of Tartarus, while in vastly different physical circumstances, are similarly isolated from the rest of the world, unaware of any existence beyond the mechanical dreariness of their own. While they are constantly hard at work, the maids are stagnant, just as the bachelors, in that they mindlessly repeat the same task in perpetuity. The narrator himself marks similarities between the Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, the latter recognized as “the very counterpart of the Paradise of Bachelors, but snowed upon, and frost-painted to a sephulcre” (1504). 

The term “sephulcre,” however, suggests a depleted relationship between the Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, and, therefore, between England and America. Representative of this relationship might be Cupid, the character in the Tartarus of Maids. Of course, the name “Cupid” alludes to some sort of traditional love story, as does the juxtaposition of “Bachelor” and “Maid.” However, the Cupid within the story is a rather ignorant character himself who acts “impudently.” When the narrator incredulously wonders how the maids work in a tight space full of “poisonous particles” without coughing, Cupid merely replies, “Oh, they are used to it.” If Cupid represents the link between the bachelors and maids and England and America, then it is evidently weak. The old-fashioned, detached English bachelors have lost any bond or communication with the young, industrialized American maids. In fact, these bachelors’ Paradise seems to make the maids’ lives reminiscent of Tartarus, or hell. I wonder if Melville’s metaphor of “bachelor” and “maiden” actually alludes to a broader commentary on the frigid, stagnant relationship between old England and young America.