Crossings in Text and Textile

5. “Such Hosts of Rags”: Transatlantic Crossings between Paper and Cotton in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”

125 5 “Such Hosts of Rags” TransatlanticCrossingsbetweenPaperandCottoninMelville’s “TheParadiseofBachelorsandtheTartarusofMaids” Amber Shaw “Before my eyes—there, passing in slow procession along the wheeling cylinders, I seemed to see, glued to the pallid incipience of the pulp, the yet more pallid faces of all the pallid girls I had eyed that heavy day” —Herman Melville, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids” In the closing pages of his chapter on the Lowell, Massachusetts, textile mills, in American Notes for General Circulation (1842), Charles Dickens gestures toward comparing the quality of life of the New England mill “girls” he has observed and that of the Manchester, England, workers with whom he is “well acquainted” (154). In describing the comparative luxury of Lowell’s factory system, Dickens implicitly asks his readers to recognize the inhumane working conditions of the mills in Manchester. A little over a decade later, Herman Melville uses the same rhetorical strategy in his diptych “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” which was published in the April 1855 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine. Melville’s story fictionalizes two visits, one to a dinner party of London bachelors in Temple Bar and the other to a desolate New England mill. As with Dickens, Melville urges his readers to translate their misgivings about the horrific mill working conditions for women across the Atlantic. Melville ’s Dickens-like fictionalization of transatlantic travelogues emphasizes the chiasmus of text or textile crossings. While Dickens looks to the United States as a way to critique Britain, Melville inverts the international comparison , suggesting that the idle British bachelors are an oblique commentary on American mill girls and the culture that exploits them. These two texts, of course, are not completely reciprocal, for Melville’s story is fictional. Dick- Amber Shaw 126 ens’s notoriety and the subsequent vogue for factory tours, however, points to the interest in cotton production at this cultural moment. Just as we might question whether it’s fair to compare Lowell and Manchester, Melville’s short story itself, as a piece of fiction, inherently poses the problems of eyewitness believability and supposedly factual accounts.1 Throughout “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” Melville highlights the discrepancy between public praise of the mills and the reality of life within the factory walls. In subtly noting these national and generic differences, Melville at once talks about—and does not talk about—the Lowell mills. By describing cotton–rag paper production instead of textile weaving and by filtering these observations through his largely ambivalent narrator, Melville emphasizes the real material—and transatlantic—connections between consumer and factory. In doing so, he underscores the relationship between the actual poor working conditions in the New England factories and the more nebulous damage from the transatlantic literary community’s idealization of the Lowell mills and urges his readers to come to terms with their own complicity in the global economy. Claiming he has “carefully abstained from drawing a comparison between these factories and those of our own land,” Dickens provokes his nominally British (but, ultimately, transatlantic) audience with ethical questions about the differences between the two towns: Are we quite sure that we in England have not formed our ideas of the ‘station’ of working people, from accustoming ourselves to the contemplation of that class as they are, and not as they might be? I think that if we examine our own feelings, we shall find that the pianos, and the circulating libraries, and even the LowellOffering, startle us by their novelty, and not by their bearing upon any abstract question of right and wrong. (161) This distinction between “novelty” and ethical correctness is noteworthy in its implicit condemnation of his British readers, and it’s one that lurks just beneath the surface of Dickens’s entire account of his visit to Lowell. For Dickens, the amenities that Lowell workers enjoy are not just frivolous pastimes but concrete examples of the contrasts between the mills and the nations . The piano is not just a piano; rather, it’s a material good that suggests the workers are treated as real human beings and not mere cogs in the factory system. "Such Hosts of Rags" 127 In fact, such effusive praise for Lowell and its mill system was not unusual; Dickens’s keen interest in the cleanliness of the mills and the humanity with which the “girls” were treated are common tropes...