Bartleby and the Psychopathology of Slacking

This prompt on the "male-centric" nature of Melville's novella elicited some powerful responses.

Here, for instance, is AML: "If I were forced to say whether this was a “male” or “female” narrator, I would have guessed a female authored this story based on the kindness and consideration shown to Bartleby at all times.   It is hard to imagine that most men would not react the way Mr. Nippers did, by threatening to blacken Bartleby’s eyes more than once when he refused to do what was asked of him."

But that's just the point of the strangeness of the story, especially it's fear of progress at its core. Compare Jane Eyre's frustration with feeling boxed in, with Bartleby's: Jane is bursting at the seams, to escape her restraints, rushing up to the rooftop to view just how far she can travel; Bartleby, meanwhile, is completely agoraphobic, would just as soon spend the rest of his life in a windowless closet.

What kind of man is that? we ask. But that's just the point, as I noted in the original prompt: Two bestsellers, a new wife, two new sons -- a whole life before him and yet Melville writes the extraordinary eerie tale of a much younger man who literally cannot go forward with his life (and with a female here we would always point to social factors limiting her mobility -- "If society were not so male dominated . . . ") and a much older and successful man (maybe the character Melville sees himself as possibly becoming) who for all his success is utterly unable to offer Bartleby (maybe a part of Melville's own fear of a success in the world he loathes) any solace whatsoever.

"Bartleby" is for me a tale about the psychopathology of slacking -- what can happen to someone who really has no place in either the world of work or family. This is clearly not the problem that 21-century women face in blending work and family; this is more of a problem of a gay male artist in a harshly homophobic 19th century, a place where someone like Melville may well have envisioned absolutely no place either for his art (and Melville's masterpiece Moby Dick was largely ignored on plbilcation, and he died in near total obscurity) or for his desire. Unlike Whitman who lived semi-openly with a Washington, D.C. streetcar conductor, Peter Doyle, from 1865 to his death in 1892, with Melville there is only the homosexual anguish of writings, like his late masterpiece, Billy Budd. (The photo here is a still from the 1962 film, starring a beautiful young Terrence Stamp as Billy and Robert Ryan as John Claggart, the fiercely repressed Master of Arms; Peter Ustinov, the film's director, plays the role of the Captain, a well-meaning but finally ineffectual man charged with resolving such issues, similar to Bartleby's lawyer.)

It seems to me that in his early thirties, Melville saw Bartleby and the lawyer as two equally unsatisfactory dead-ends. For all that, it is a tale whose full resolution escapes me and, for all its dark humor, that continues to haunt me even or because of its resistance to any neat, simplistic explanation.

A couple of notes

1. The Dead Letter Office is a real place, not just a symbol, and, alas, exists today, yes even in 2013, as the final repository for mail, lacking a return address, that cannot be delivered.
2. For this response we only had a single and abbreviated response from a male student.
   
   Clearly, the question is not whether or not women readers could appreciate, even empathize with the story -- one would expect the "typical" male to agree with Nippers and toss Bartleby out on his ear: For better or worse (in my view, almost always worse) men do seem to be more fully socialized into Weber's "iron cage" of capitalism, and hence have far less sympathy with those failing or otherwise chewed up by the system. Here, for instance, is what Wikipedia has to say about Tea Party membership in the U.S.: "Several polls have been conducted on the demographics of the movement. Though the various polls sometimes turn up slightly different results, they tend to show that Tea Party supporters tend more likely than Americans overall to be white, male, married, older than 45, regularly attending religious services, conservative, and to be more wealthy and have more education."
   
   Meanwhile I still do not see how the lawyer's puzzlement at his own unexpected sympathy for Bartleby (a would-be son) could be portrayed by a woman, from whom we would such symapthy for her misunderstood, cast-off son.
3. Meanwhile, there are plenty of female stories ahead for students who are interested, including a 400-level course on the Brontes this summer (2nd session) and a 400-level course ("The Age of Desire") in the fall, focusing on Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Henry James's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady.