American Literature

Barbara Foley
From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's "Bartleby"
American Literature - Volume 72, Number 1, March 2000, pp. 87-116

Duke University Press

Barbara Foley - From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's "Bartleby" - American Literature 72:1 American Literature 72.1 (2000) 87-116 From Wall Street to Astor Place: Historicizing Melville's "Bartleby" Barbara Foley * In recent years critics have been calling for a regrounding of mid-nineteenth-century American literature -- of the romance in particular -- in politics and history. John McWilliams applauds the contemporary "challenge to the boundaryless and abstract qualities of the older idea of the Romance's neutral territory." George Dekker notes that recent attempts to "rehistoricize the American romance" have entailed an "insist[ence] that our major romancers have always been profoundly concerned with what might be called the mental or ideological `manners' of American society, and that their seemingly anti-mimetic fictions both represent and criticize those manners." But Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" (1853) has to this point been exempted from a thoroughgoing historical recontextualization; its subtitle remains to be fully explained. Not all readings of the tale, to be sure, have been "boundaryless and abstract." Critics interested in the tale's autobiographical dimension have interpreted it as an allegory of the writer's fate in a market society, noting specific links with Melville's own difficult authorial career. Scholars concerned with the story's New York setting have discovered some...