Seeds of Discontent: The Expanding Satiric Range of Melville's Transatlantic Diptychs

Aaron Winter

Leviathan, Volume 8, Issue 2, June 2006, pp. 17-35 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

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Seeds of Discontent:
The Expanding Satiric Range of Melvilles Transatlantic Diptychs
AARON WINTER University of California, Irvine

fter the critical and commercial failure of Mardi (1849), Herman Melville promised his London editor that he would henceforth write no metaphysics, no conic sections, nothing but cakes & ale.1 If Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850) were a moderately successful return to the accessible sea adventures that had made his transatlantic literary reputation, Moby-Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852) were puzzling relapses into abstruse navel-gazing, especially for a would-be professional author with a growing family and a mounting debt. Bridling his wildest metaphysical ambitions for a second time, Melville spent the next period of his career hammering out material for Harpers New Monthly and Putnams Monthly at a rate of five dollars per printed page.2 The magazine pieces are narrative experiments angling toward a cakes and ale populism that is nonetheless flexible enough to accommodate Melvilles ever-sharpening critique of American social and political values. One particular type of experiment is repeated in The Two Temples, Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids. Written at Arrowhead in late 1853, and submitted
C 2006 The Authors Journal compilation C 2006 The Melville Society and Blackwell Publishing Inc

Herman Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1993), 132. Many thanks to John Bryant, Brook Thomas, Mark Goble, and Linda Georgianna for helping me revise this essay.

Melville published most of these pieces anonymously although his authorship was an open secret. See Lea Bertani Vozar Newman, A Readers Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville (Boston: Hall, 1986), 283. This period (1853-56) includes Israel Potter, serialized in Putnams (1854-55), and Melvilles early work on The Confidence-Man (1857), initially conceived as another serial for Putnams. The difference between Melvilles popular works and his metaphysical works should not be overstated. As Sheila Post-Lauria argues, Mardi, Pierre and Moby-Dick are deeply indebted to the conventions of the contemporary literary marketplace; their relative unpopularity probably results from their gymnastic attempts to hybridize modes and genres appealing to different audiences. Likewise the other works mentioned here are far more than boilerplate. See her Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996). My sketch here only indicates how these works were received by contemporary audiences and how Melville himself spoke of them at the time. All of Melvilles prose balances multiple commitments; the magazine writings are characteristic in this regard rather than anomalous.

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for publication in the spring of 1854,3 these works share obvious topical and structural traits. Each is a satire of contemporary British and American socioeconomic conditions, and each is a set of paired narratives. Invoking the form of the two-paneled medieval religious painting, Jay Leyda first labeled these works diptychs in his Complete Short Stories of Herman Melville: The striking pictorial quality of all Melvilles writings found a precise reflection within the medium of the short story in the form of the diptych. At least three times he displayed pairs of contrasting images (Look here, upon this picture, and on this), to make the light one brighter, and the dark one blacker.4 More recent critics have followed Leyda in categorizing these stories as diptychs and in viewing them as morally contrastive pictorial pairs.5 The diptych designation is useful as far as it goes, but it elides important differences between the three works and fails to account for their rhetorical complexity. Let me offer some supplemental terminology. The Two Temples comes closest to fitting Leydas rubric, establishing an ironic contrast whereby the first tale, or panel of the diptych, is held up against the second from the sufficiently reliable focal point of the protagonist/narrator. In Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs, however, the
3

The Two Temples was unpublished during Melvilles lifetime, as I will discuss later. Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs was first published in the June 1854 Harpers and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids in the April 1855 Harpers. See Merton M. Sealts, Jr., Historical Note in Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales and Other Prose Pieces (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), 485-93; hereafter cited as NN PT.

4 Jay Leyda, ed. The Complete Short Stories of Herman Melville (New York: Random House, 1949). My supposition is that Leydas emphasis on the pictorial quality of Melvilles short stories may reflect the predominance of the concept of the pictorial in literary criticism in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The most influential essay in this regard was Joseph Franks Spatial Form in Modern Literature, which argued that while literature had traditionally been a temporal form, with temporal sequence representing something like the essence of literariness, modern authors such as Joyce, Proust, T.S. Eliot, and Djuna Barnes had liberated literature from its dependence on temporal sequentiality, substituting non-sequential, simultaneous spatial forms which approximated certain techniques in the plastics arts. Leyda perhaps saw in Melvilles work an anticipation of this trend. See Sewanee Review 53.2-3 (1945): 221-40, 433-56, 643-53. Andrew Delbanco notes that Melville read a book about diptych paintings in 1848 and viewed some in London the next year. See Melville: His World and His Work (New York: Knopf, 2005), 224. 5

Post-Lauria notes that Melvilles use of this form was by no means unprecedented: the diptych, with its corresponding allusions to social inequities and problems, represented a popular strategy found in mid-nineteenth-century magazines and novels (172). Obviously Melville employed contrastive techniques before his magazine period. John Wenke argues that the dialogic juxtaposition of places and characters that represent fixed ideational complexes in Mardi anticipates the diptychs. See his Melvilles Muse: Literary Creation and the Forms of Philosophical Fiction (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1995), 47-59. We might also compare the diptychs to the overlaying of distinct events occurring in the same place that Hershel Parker cites as a recurring pattern in Melvilles literary work and psychological history. See Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1.2.

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diptych performs a reiterative doubling: both panels undermine the narrators position as satiric observer, making him also a satirized participant. And in The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, the two panels of the diptych form a fascinating dialectical interconnection; their narrative and geographic division is only superficial. Here, the ironic distance opened between the diptych and its narrator (nugatory in The Two Temples and crucial in Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs) is no longer sustainable, and the narrative itself falls victim to its own satiric indictment. Each diptych in this structural sequence is in turn more satirically effective in its employment of the diptych structure, because each in turn achieves a greater satiric range.6 By range I mean inclusiveness, and given that we are speaking of satire, I intend the military pun. A satire of wide enough range catches its reader within its figurative detonation and prevents this reader from displacing culpability onto some other target safely contained within the pages he or she reads. This rhetorical strategy comes with risks, and eventually I want to examine its implications for Melvilles reader. I will also argue that the satiric modes in Melvilles transatlantic diptychs can serve as methodological models for todays transatlantic literary critic.

Two Temples: Ironic Contrast

f Melvilles three diptychs, The Two Temples is the least structurally complex. In the first panel, our narrator attends Sunday morning services at a marble-buttressed, stained-glassed, spic-and-span new temple (NN PT 303). His best coat held hostage by a recalcitrant tailor, the narrator is denied entry to the temple by a fat-paunched, beadle-faced man on the basis of his shabby dress. Suddenly aware of the class privilege from which he is momentarily excluded, he complains that he is defrauded of [his] natural rights (305). The narrator is able to sneak into the church through an unguarded side door and witness the service by climbing up inside the church tower. But when the congregation leaves, he finds himself locked in and, worse yet, late for an important meeting. His only recourse is to ring the churchs bell, which leads to his arrest. Sternly reprimanded, the narrator flees New York on account of his damaged character, and all for the crime of having humbly indulged [himself] in the luxury of public worship (309). In the second panel, the same narrator is a penniless drifter in Babylonian London (NN PT 310). Having arranged to accompany a wealthy

I am not proposing that these structural developments necessarily reflect the compositional sequence of the three diptychs. According to Newman, that sequence has yet to be established: The available evidence points to the likelihood that Melville was working on his three bipartite pieces. . . at about the same time (342). A JOURNAL OF MELVILLE STUDIES 19

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young lady as her personal physician on a European tour, he is cavalierly dismissed upon their arrival in England when she suddenly changes her travel plans. The narrator, bankrupted by the cost of the voyage, seeks the solace of a genial humane assembly (311), but since it is Saturday night all the churches are closed. When some sort of a working man (312) offers him a theater ticket, the narrator hesitates; this would be the first charitable gift he has ever received. Swallowing his pride, he enters, climbing to the topmost gallery of this second temple, and feeling the same dizzy altitude as he did at the top of the church tower (313). The bewildering and blazing spectacle (313) of the play and the narrators feeling of communion with his fellow spectators throw him into an ecstatic trance and lead him to reflect on his earlier humiliation: a stranger in a strange land, I found sterling charity in the one [temple]; and at home, in my own land, was thrust out from the other (315). The contrastive irony of The Two Temples depends on the unraveling of two related assumptions. Whereas Melvilles American reader associates home with inclusive democracy, and the strange land of Britain with exclusive hierarchy, the diptych reveals that the social playing field is actually more level abroad. Similarly, whereas the church ought to be a bastion of truth against the illusionism of the theater, we find that, while both institutions trade in spectacle, only the theater offers genuine fulfillment. As Marvin Fisher writes, Melville detaches the American Dream of an egalitarian social order from the American nation as its necessary locus [of] realization, thus questioning the self-styled role of America as the redeemer nation.7 Although there are class distinctions inside the theaterthe narrator notes the jeweled necks and sparkling arms of the ladies in the lower seats (NN PT 313) all sectors of the population are nevertheless welcome. The narrator need not sneak into this temple, for even if he cannot afford to pay, someone will offer him a place. Although the stratification of the seating by ticket price may stretch the notion of the theaters fulfillment of a truly Christian ideal of equality, it seems to satisfy the minimum natural rights the narrator had demanded earlier.8 The theater is envisioned, like Jacksonian democracy, as a space that allows participation to a plurality of economic classes. The
7

Marvin Fisher, Focus on Melvilles The Two Temples: The Denigration of the American Dream in American Dreams, American Nightmares, ed. David Madden (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970), 86.

I disagree with Judith Hiltners insistence that even in the theater where [the narrator] finds community, class separation is as intense as it was in the church; see her From Pisgah to Egypt: Narrative Continuities in Melvilles Israel Potter and The Two Temples, Journal of Narrative Technique 19.3 (1989): 304.

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performance, which begins with some inspiring national anthem, melds the audience into one body of enraptured thousands (313, 315). The theater redeems the churchs false promise of genial humane assembly. The narrators mistrust of liturgyI could not rid my soul of the thought, that . .. I looked down upon some sly enchanters show (NN PT 306)is reversed in his appreciation of stagecraft: Hath mere mimicry done this? (315). The implication is that any performance that integrates a community should be considered a sacrament, and any that fails to do so should not. As Beryl Rowland argues, Melvilles dedication of The Two Temples to Sheridan Knowles provides a clue to the diptychs inversion of the altar and the stage. Knowles, a former actor turned Baptist preacher, defended the institution of the theater and attacked the ritual illusionism of the Catholic Church and the Puseyite Anglican Church.9 Melville, who had slammed low church pieties in Typee and Omoo, is less interested in antiCatholicism or anti-Anglicanism than he is in demonstrating the hypocrisy of American religious institutions in general; after all, anti-theatrical prejudice was more closely associated with the liberal and revivalist congregations that derived from Puritanism. The most persistent problem for critics of The Two Temples has been whether to take Melvilles syrupy apologia pro theatro seriously. But the diptych is so markedly contrastive that the second episode has little meaning except as an ironic commentary upon the first. Although the narrator is, as Judith Hiltner puts it, a childlike figure motivated by naive objectives (Hiltner 302), his overly sanguine estimation of the London temple reflects his deep disappointment with the Manhattan temple, emphasizing Melvilles satiric contrast between American ideals and American reality. There is further historical evidence to support this view. Noting that Melville designates the English actor William Macready as the lead in the second temples production, Dennis Berthold reads the story in light of the Astor Place riot, in which a mob of ten to fifteen thousand working-class New Yorkers, galvanized by xenophobia and class antagonism, gathered to protest Macreadys May 10, 1849 performance at lower Manhattans Astor Place Opera House. Melville, who lived just a few blocks from the theater at the time, signed the petition in support of Macready that was the direct cause of the riot. Given this affiliation, Berthold concludes that only the most forced ironic reading can dismiss the
9

Beryl Rowland, Melville Answers the Theologians: The Ladder of Charity in The Two Temples, Mosaic 7 (1974): 4-5. James Duban notes that Melville was not the first to criticize the ostentation of Grace Church by drawing a connection between its economic exclusionism and its use of ritual enchantment, citing analogues in the humor magazine Yankee Doodle and in Walt Whitmans editorials for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle; see his Satiric Precedent for Melvilles The Two Temples, American Transcendental Quarterly 42 (1979): 137-45.

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resolvent power of English art10 in the diptych. For Putnams Monthly editor Charles Briggs, Melvilles dubious redemptive vision of the English temple was an issue of lesser importance than his vitriolic criticism of the American one. Briggs, who identified the satiric targets of Temple First as New Yorks Grace Church and the beadle-faced man as its sexton, Isaac Brown, declined The Two Temples for publication, writing to Melville: I am very loth to reject the Two Temples as the article contains some exquisitely fine description, and some pungent satire, but my editorial experience compels me to be very cautious in offending the religious sensibilities of the public, and the moral of the Two Temples would array against us the whole power of the pulpit, to say nothing of Brown and the congregation of Grace Church.11 The jab at Brown, combined with the dedication to Knowles and the reference to Macready, suggests that The Two Temples follows a conventional satiric procedure in opposing vice and virtue. As M.C. Randolph has observed, the second step in this procedure is usually more formulaic than psychologically pleasing.12 Even if the narrators naivet e suggests that we take his assessment of the second temple with a grain of salt, it renders this forlorn outcast (NN PT 310) all the more sympathetic to the reader. Indeed, the close identification between the narrator and the reader, established in part by the narrators frequent and genial use of the present tense, is crucial to the mobility of the plot.13 The plight of the narrator provides the work and its reader with the means of crossing from one side of the ocean (and from one panel of the diptych) to the other; we are placed in his shoes throughout. On the other hand, it is certainly possible to read the narrators genial naivet e as a smokescreen protecting his identity as
10

Dennis Berthold, Class Acts: The Astor Place Riots and Melvilles The Two Temples, American Literature 71:3 (1999): 430, 452. The protestors threw stones and bricks at the theater until the National Guard arrived and opened fire into the crowd, killing twenty-two, whereupon they dispersed. As qtd. In Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: A Biography (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2.218. Rowland notes that Temple First also duplicates many of the features of another church that had been recently rebuilt at this time, Wall Streets Trinity Church. See Grace Church and Melvilles Story of The Two Temples, Nineteenth-Century Fiction 28 (1973): 339-46.

11

12 M.C. Randolph, The Structural Design of Formal Verse Satire, Philological Quarterly 21 (1942): 374. 13

Berthold, who aligns the diptych with events in Melvilles life dating several years prior to its publication, writes, Melville is closer to his narrator than in any other short story. Both are literally and figuratively men at sea; . . . both confront ethical contradictions, and both require charity to continue their materially impoverished lives. In his naivet e and cultural innocence, the narrator, a figure characterized by a poverty not just of the purse but of political, moral, and epistemological certainty as well, mirrors Melville the bewildered Young American ideologue of 1849 (452).

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a social bounder or confidence man. Perhaps he has no tailor, no meeting, and no character, and his shabby dress is a realistic indicator of his class status. Perhaps he really isnt a physician, and the young lady dismisses him when she discovers so, or on account of some other impropriety. We lack reliable evidence either way, as we must depend on the narrator for information. But even if he is putting us on, it is just as likely that he is doing so out of embarrassment rather than contrivance. Ultimately, the credibility of the narrator is not really at issue in The Two Temples, as it is in many of Melvilles other magazine pieces. The diptych finds Melville testing the sort of narrative voice that Irving had mastered in The Sketch-Book; indeed Temple Second resembles A Sunday in London rather closely, echoing Irvings opening (that Great Babel, London) and his climax (the sanctifying effect of the church music . . . poured forth, like a river of joy through the innermost recesses of the great metropolis . . . bearing the poor world worn soul on a tide of triumphant harmony to heaven).14 Like Irving, Melville knew that an appealing, genial narrator could help to make a barbed satire more palatable; obviously that wasnt enough for Briggs in this instance. Whatever we think of the narrator of The Two Temples, it is evident that he is merely instrumental; he does not fall within the range of the satire in this work. But in the next diptych, charity is dysfunctional in America and Britain, and the narrators geniality and transatlantic mobility are targets of satire rather than devices for satire.

Pudding and Crumbs: Reiterative Doubling

y placing its narrator at a distance of forty years from the events he relates, Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs achieves a more nuanced mode of irony than The Two Temples. In Picture First, the poet Blandmours assertionthrough kind nature, the poor, out of their very poverty, extract comfort (NN PT 291)recalls the declaration of the Irvingesque narrator in The Two Temples: tis not always poverty to be poor (314). Blandmour proposes an experiment to verify his claim; the narrator will call at the shabby residence of the Coulters and taste their delicious dinner of Poor Mans Pudding. The yeoman and his pregnant wife are gaunt, exhausted, and joyless, but despite the narrators occasional gaffes his fine dress causes his hosts much embarrassment and he learns that the poor themselves do not employ the phrase Poor Mans Pudding (290) he is graciously entertained. But Blandmour proves to be wrong; Poor Mans Pudding, a bitter and mouldy concoction of rice, milk, and salt (295), is
14

Washington Irving, History, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1983), 841-42.

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inedible, and the Coulters extract no comfort from the kind nature: Dark grief leaks in, just like the rain from our roof . . . all the damp day long grief drizzles and drizzles down on my soul. Half choked with pudding and sympathy, the narrator retreats to Blandmours comfortable sofa, before a blazing fire (296). In Picture Second, the same narrator recalls his rambles in London during the summer after his visit to the Coulters and his chance acquaintance with an off-duty official who boasts of the citys noble charities and offers him special opportunity to observe them. The previous night, a royal assembly hosted by the Prince Regent had gathered at the Guildhall for a sumptuous feast celebrating the victory at Waterloo. Today, the citys beggars will be granted access to the leftovers. The narrator is again skeptical, but ever eager to play the spectator; his I come but to roam and see (NN PT 298) evokes Irvings I was always fond of visiting new scenes and observing strange characters and manners.15 The only way into the hall is to join the mass of lean, hungry, and ferocious creatures gormandizing the sparse remains of the feast, their potentially violent behavior checked by armed guards. When the unglutted (301) beggars stampede, the narrator must act decisively to escape the tumult: Hit that manstrike him down! hold! jam! now! now! wrench along for your life! The narrators clothing is so damaged from the riot that his guide must vouch for his status so that he is not mistaken for one of the pestiferous mob (300): This is a gentleman you carry (301). Retiring once again to a comfortable hearth, the narrator concludes with the epigram, Heaven save me equally from the Poor Mans Pudding and the Rich Mans Crumbs (302). The and of the title establishes not only the diptych, but also the reiterative doubling that occurs between its two components. For both the Coulters in rural America and the beggars in London, the lot of the poor man is to make his pudding from the rich mans crumbs. In America, this situation is exacerbated by peculiar social sensibilities (NN PT 296) that render the acceptance of charity shameful (as seen previously in the narrators hesitance to use the free ticket he is offered in The Two Temples) and also by an obviously unrealized ideal of universal equality. As in The Two Temples, the diptych serves as a tool for skewering the notion of American moral superiority.16 Thus, while there is only one type of poverty, a misery and infamy which is, ever has
15 16

From The Authors Account of Himself (Irving 743).

As James Duban writes, Skeptical about facile comparisons of Old and New World politics, Melville . . . intimates the existence of embarrassing correspondences and relations amidst the appearance of diversity. The consonance is that of human suffering despite dissonant systems of politics at home and abroad. See his Transatlantic Counterparts: The Diptych and Social Inquiry

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been, and ever will be, precisely the same [everywhere], there are at least two distinct types of rationalized contempt for poverty: the natural philanthropy of Blandmour and the institutional philanthropy of the London charities. The two panels of the diptych situate the narrator as a kind of ethnographer who disproves these doctrines of philanthropy by observational evidence. The diptychs detailed descriptions of natural scenery, which adopt the mode of a sketch or travelogue, are particularly appropriate for calling attention to the way in which Blandmour and his London counterpart sentimentalize poverty. What Leyda saw as the striking pictorial quality of this and the other diptychs may instead be a double dose of Melvilles earlier parody of the literary povertiresque in Pierre. A glance at Melvilles 1849 journal reveals that he was by no means guiltless of this type of sentimental trivializing himself: Through the influence of the Fire Officer I pushed my way through cellars & anti-lanes into the rear of the Guildhall, with a crowd of beggars who were going to receive the broken meats & pies from yesterdays grand banquet (Lord Mayors Day)Within the hall, the scene was comical . . . (A good thing might be made of this.)17 The word comical appears seven times in Redburn, written several months earlier, and it generally connotes something like droll.18 Melvilles journal entry evinces amusement rather than sympathy; a good thing might resemble the comical adventure of the passenger whom the Greenland sailor ties up in the Highlanders rigging (NN Redburn 108). In returning to his journal as a source for Picture Second, Melville interrogates his own use of the povertiresque. The droll comical scene in the journal becomes the suffocating satirical scene19 of the published sketch. Pictorial amusement requires the
in Melvilles Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs, New England Quarterly 66.2 (1993): 275.
17 Melville, Journals, ed. Howard C. Horsford and Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1989), 492. 18

Comical can also connote surprising or disproportionate, as in the books descriptions of Jacksons occasional good moods, a young stowaways pants, the small cargo ships at the Liverpool dock, an old gun whose touch-hole is shaped like a human ear, a middle-aged Londoners ridiculous coat, and even Redburns comical sadness at finding his fathers London guidebook obsolete (since it reflects the mature narrators amusement at his younger self and that coming of age requires him to be his own guide). Melville, Redburn (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1969): 61, 112, 166, 175, 261, 149; hereafter cited as NN Redburn. See Alvin Kernans use of this term in his The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959).

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successful isolation of the spectators ego; when this isolation is violated it may dissolve into sympathy, but it may also harden into contempt. Note the strong contrast between the grammatical first and third person in I pushed my way through with a crowd of beggars (my italics) and the absence of any distinct person in hold! jam! now! now! Melville indeed makes a good thing out of the Guildhall scene, but that good thing is now a critique of apathetic spectatorship. After the first episode the narrator has confirmed his initial skepticism of Blandmours platitudes. But what has permitted him access to this wisdom? Unlike his counterpart in The Two Temples, he is not overtaken by circumstances beyond his control. Rather, he chooses the role of a touristic spectator who can move freely between social spheres by virtue of a sort of mediality. By this word I wish to indicate both the narrators supposed position as a median between poverty and wealth and the access it provides him as a kind of ethnographic or journalistic medium, or communicant. Both narrators become voyeurs, but the first does so as a compensation for his exclusion (i.e. from the first temple), while the second does so intentionally upon the premise of his inclusion (i.e. with the Coulters and with the London beggars). The narrators final rebuttal of Blandmour is delicate: You are not what may rightly be called a rich man; you have a fair competence; no more. Is it not so? Well then, I do not include you, when I say, that if ever a Rich Man speaks prosperously to me of a Poor Man, I shall set it down as I wont mention the word (NN PT 296). He places both Blandmour and himself in a medial position between Rich and Poor. But having observed the vast gap between Blandmours fair competence and the Coulters poverty, his belief in the tenability of this status is surely strained, Despite what he says to the poet, the narrator obviously intends Blandmour to be an example of a Rich Man speaking prosperously; this character will resurface in The Confidence-Man as the philosopher Mark Winsome. But to what extent has the enlightened narrator been able to identify his own position with Blandmours? Forty years later, he permits himself a lengthy diatribe lamenting the sorrows of the poor (NN PT 296), but the fact remains that at the time he did nothing to help the Coulters materially (such offerings would have been more than declined; charity resented) or even emotionally: When a companions heart of itself overflows, the best one can do is to do nothing (295). The narrators defining moment is still the Guildhall riot; striking his way through the mob, he asserts through physical force that he really belongs on the side of the crumb-strewing rich men. Like Amaso Delanos foot grinding the prostrate Babo, Maurice Lee writes, the narrators act of unmediated violence turns him from observer to participant. . . . we see
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beyond a doubt whose foot is on whose throat.20 A trope that Melville uses elsewhere to distill the brutality of slavery and colonialismrecall Tommo striking an islander with a boathook in his escape from Typeeis used here to suggest the ineluctability of class conflict. In effect, Melville internalizes the contrastive satiric mode of The Two Temples within the psyche of his narrator in Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs. While the passive narrator of the first diptych only notes the irony of his situation in hindsight, the narrator of the second diptych is a curious observer who actively investigates such social ironies. More significantly, Melville widens the satiric range of the second diptych in order to criticize the dilettantism of this participant narrator, using a strategy of narrative irony similar to the one he employs in Bartleby.21 The critique of the dilettantish narrator in Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs has further satiric implications. Like this narrator, Melvilles magazine reader is a mobile voyeur who, by reading the diptych, engages in a comparative ethnology of poverty from a hypothetically objective viewpoint. Reading allows one to become an Emersonian transparent eyeball, everywhere at once and yet nowhere in particular.22 The narrator posits himself as a transparent voyeur, but the diptych makes it clear that his class privilege enables this role, and further that the more one sees, the less one actually remains transparent and uninvolved. Thus Melville is working simultaneously within and against the conventions of Harpers Magazine identified by Sheila Post-Lauria: aloof, spectator-narrators representing the privileged middle class isolat[ing] themselves from the events they relate and us[ing] their status to observe less fortunate characters from above (Post-Lauria 168). Just as it is contemptible for Blandmour to discourse on the poor from his comfortable armchair, so is it dubious for the narrator to
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Maurice Lee, Melvilles Mistakes: Correcting the Politics of Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs ESQ 41.2 (1995): 166. As Marvin Fisher writes, the narrator, who feels fortunate in reaching his lodgings merely bruised and battered, seems a much lesser man than the one who penetrated Blandmours rationalizations. . . . he also asks that he be spared the responsibility of having to act on the basis of his insights. See Poor Mans Pudding: Melvilles Meditation on Grace, American Transcendental Quarterly 13 (1972): 34. The narrator of Bartleby is also a dilettantish would-be philanthropist; the narrative irony in his case is that it is really he who would prefer not to exert any genuine effort.

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Note also Emersons Blandmour-like praise of poverty in Nature: Debt . . . is a preceptor whose lessons cannot be foregone, and is needed most by those who suffer from it most. Moreover, property, which has been well compared to snow,if it fall level today it will be blown into drifts tomorrow,is the surface action of internal machinery, like the index on the face of a clock. Whilst now it is in the gymnastics of the understanding, it is hiving, in the foresight of the spirit, experience in profounder laws. In the diptych Blandmour refers to snow enthusiastically as Poor Mans Manure. See Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller: Selected Works (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 39.

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make the Coulters his object of speculative research, although there is in this second case at least the possibility of enlightenment. If Picture First rejects the pabulum of comfortable poverty, Picture Second dismisses the posture of enlightened wealth. Melville implies that an observer cannot shuttle between economic poles without ultimately belonging to one or the other. Thus the diptych issues, as R. Bruce Bickley writes, a type of social and moral challenge to its reader.23 Yet it also acknowledges that this moral challenge is pharisaical, insofar as the demolition of the narrators illusory medial status, and perhaps also the readers illusory medial status, is launched from the equally illusory medial space of an anonymous magazine article. As Lee writes, Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs raises the question of the relation of writing to power [and] the potential authoritarianism of certain types of authorship (Lee 168-69). But it is Melvilles third diptych that contains his most thorough consideration of the quandary of his own authorship.

Bachelors and Maids: Dialectical Interconnection

he Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids reverses the geographical movement of the other two diptychs. Our American narrator once again travels to London but does so in the first panel, returning home in the second. The diptych begins in Londons Temple district, where the narrator wines and dines with a fraternity of lawyers. His entry is figured as a mystic journey through a cool, deep glen (NN PT 316) that takes him far away from the whole care-worn world. A bit of fanciful genealogy establishes the lawyers as latter-day descendants of the medieval Knights-Templar; bachelors living in monastic seclusion but devoted to no calling higher than their own pleasure. In a scene rivaling Moby-Dicks A Squeeze of the Hand (Ch. 94) for its sexualized conviviality, the narrator is so enthralled by the bachelor lifestyle that he exclaims to the host, with a burst of admiring candorSir, this is the very Paradise of Bachelors! (323). The second panel, presenting the opposing world of The Tartarus of Maids, begins with a travelogue closely mirroring the opening of the first. But instead of an ambling spring stroll into a homosocial paradise, the narrator now recounts an arduous winter trek to a remote paper mill that takes him past a series of landmarks whose names suggest gothic terror and female anatomy: Woedolor Mountain, Mad Maids Bellow Pipe, Black Notch, Devils Dungeon, and Blood River. The narrator hopes to reduce the overhead of

23 R. Bruce Bickley, Jr, The Method of Melvilles Short Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), 86.

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his seedsmans business by purchasing the incredible quantity of paper envelopes he uses to package the seeds directly from the factory. Ducking into the mill to escape the icy wind, he confronts the infernal scene of the factorys operation, where the Maidsblank looking girls, with blank, white folders in their blank hands, all blankly folding paper (NN PT 328)oversee the various stages of the papers mechanized production. After the narrator places his order, he asks for a guided tour of the factory, which culminates at the great machine (331) that processes the pulp into paper. Here the sexual symbolism becomes explicit: the white, wet, woolly-looking stuff (seminal pulp) is delivered from two great round vats(testicles). Alternately horrified and fascinated by the factory, the narrator feels increasingly ill. On his journey homeward, he cries out, Oh! Paradise of Bachelors and oh! Tartarus of Maids (335), a gesture recalling the final sigh of Bartlebys employer: Ah Bartleby! Ah humanity! (45). During his tour of the Devils Dungeon paper mill, the narrator is at several points viscerally afflicted by the working conditions of the maids. He nearly faints twice, experiencing strange emotion (NN PT 334) and catching a chill even inside the heated building. His withdrawal from the factory is the result of an affective overload similar to that experienced by the narrator at the Coulters house in Poor Mans Pudding. Even so, the narrators empathy with the maids alternates with a clinical curiosity about the operation of the factory, as when he conducts an experiment to confirm that one cycle of the pulp machine lasts exactly nine minutes (suggesting the nine-month period of human gestation). Nor should the narrators main reason for visiting the mill be forgotten; he commissions the tour of the factory specifically because of his new status as a high-volume customer. Whatever his ethical reservations, it never dawns on him that he might act on them. As Bickley notes, he never cancels his order (94). The narrators other motive for traveling to Devils Dungeonthe adventure of the trip (NN PT 325)can be linked to his earlier admiration for the carefree lifestyle of the London lawyers: Bachelors alone can travel freely, and without any twinges of their conscience touching desertion of the fire-side (322). And his initial description of the factory building as quaint (326) and somewhat picturesque recalls the vocabulary of Blandmour.24
24 John Gretchko argues that New Hampshires White Mountains, a popular subject for landscape painters, were the source for the narrators journey to Tartarus and therefore that Melville intended the descriptive passages to satirize the landscape artists quest for the sublime. See his The White Mountains, Thomas Cole, and Tartarus: The Sublime, The Subliminal, and the Sublimated, in Savage Eye: Melville and the Visual Arts, ed. Christopher Sten (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1991), 128. The Tartarus of Bachelors, like Poor Mans Pudding, certainly engages the picturesque as a mode of upper class delusion about the lives of workers.

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Once again, Melville offers a narrator who posits himself in the role of a voyeur, discovers social guilt in his complicity with the exploited condition of the working class, yet in the end does absolutely nothing. Karen Weyler wonders if the narrators final exclamation . . . demonstrates that his experiences have enabled him to juxtapose the positions of the two groups and from that juxtaposition gain some sort of epiphany or insight.25 But this tepid epiphany is explicitly ironized by the diptych. Critics have noted the specifically gendered mode of the narrators guilty conscience and of Melvilles narrative irony.26 The bachelors homosocial fantasy involves a stance of non-participation in the material world, which is figured as heterosexual. While working men are hurrying by . . . thinking upon rise of bread and fall of babies (NN PT 316), the easy-hearted bachelors have no wives or no children to give an anxious thought (322). Thus the bachelors sterility, their lack of metaphorical orgasmThough they took snuff very freely, yet not a man so far violated the proprieties . . . as to indulge himself in a sneeze (323)suggests a certain mode of philosophical sublimation, which is reinforced by the banquet scenes nod to Platos Symposium. (Melville even names the bachelors servant Socrates.) By sublimation I mean both repression and, more importantly, dematerialization. These heterosexual bachelors might marry maids and save them from this grotesque mockery of female productivity; even an order sworn to chivalric celibacy ought to have some stake in protecting damsels in distress. Ray Browne argues that the diptych contrasts Melvilles uncommitted person with those who are very much committed, the male Bachelors by choice as opposed to the female Bachelors against their will.27 But by placing the narrator in a dematerialized (and nongendered) medial space between the bachelors and the maids, Browne ignores Melvilles critique of his affiliation with the bachelors false mediality. These
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Karen A. Weyler, Melvilles The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids: A Dialogue about Experience, Understanding, and Truth, Studies in Short Fiction 31.3 (1994): 466-67, 468.

Wai Chee Dimock argues that in Tartarus, female sexuality . . . becomes the generalized sign for the injury of class. Economic injustice is equated throughout with sexual violation. See Residues of Justice: Literature, Law, Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 85. According to Robyn Wiegman, The two halves of Melvilles diptych [are] gendered evocations of the same economy; what initially appear as separate male and female worlds are in fact the product of a homogenizing masculine point of view, one that constructs democracy and equality only in the privileged space of a masculine paradise. See Melvilles Geography of Gender, American Literary History 1.4 (1989): 736-44.

Ray B. Browne, Two Views of Commitment: The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids, American Transcendental Quarterly 7 (1970): 47. Dimock cites the Old Red Mill in Dalton, MA as the probable source for Melvilles Tartarus and reveals that most its staff (which included men) considered factory work to be a promising avenue to social and economic selfdetermination rather than an unwelcome coercion, arguing that Melville skewed the facts to fit the figural reality of his polemic (Dimock 86-88).

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men are committed to nothing but their renunciation of commitment; this is what the uncommitted narrator finds so compelling. But as in Poor Mans Crumbs and Rich Mans Pudding, there is no life without strings attached; one chooses willful negligence and complicity with exploitation or one does not. Like Kierkegaard, Melville doubts the existential validity of the both/and. That bachelors inevitably belong to the same care-worn world as maids suggests that we must view the diptych as a unified whole rather than a contrastive or reiterative pairing. What I call the dialectical interconnection between the two halves of The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids is further articulated by Melvilles manipulation of British and American national identity. While in The Two Temples and Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs the transatlantic diptych is principally a means of interrogating myths of American moral purity, in The Paradise of Bachelor and the Tartarus of Maids it serves a broader purpose. As Sidney Bremer writes, Melvilles fictional diptych ultimately explodes both the geographical and moralistic dichotimizations that its two-part organization posits. It exposes the economic forces of production and consumption that link city to country, Europe to America.28 Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs suggests that in any particular national context, the suffering of the poor is concomitant with the indifference of the rich. The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids further argues that the actions of rich men in England (and their intermediary seedsmen) can have an impact even upon factory maids in America. As Brook Thomas writes, the plight of the maids results from an extensive interconnected system in which people are not even aware of those who contribute to their exploitation because they live thousands of miles away and have no direct contact with them.29 The diptych identifies a transatlantic (and presumably global) market economy. No longer is Melvilles narrator merely a means of uncovering ironic analogies between the two halves of the diptych. The narrator of the third diptych begins with only the dim awareness of an inverted similitude (NN PT 327) between Paradise and Tartarus: Though the two objects did by no means completely correspond, yet this partial inadequacy but served to tinge the similitude not less with the vividness than the disorder of a dream (326). There is, initially, a corresponding inverted similitude between the temperature conditions in Paradise and Tartarus.
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Sidney H. Bremer, Exploding the Myth of Rural America and Urban Europe: My Kinsman, Major Molineux and The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, Studies in Short Fiction 18.1 (1981): 54. Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 178-79.

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Paradise is a cool, deep glen surrounded by a heated plain (316). Tartarus is a heat[ed] room (334) amidst a snowy scene (328). But this scheme breaks down with the narrators sudden attack of chills in the room of the pulp machine, witnessed by the Dickensian youth who serves as his guide: Halloa! the heat of the room is too much for you, cried Cupid, staring at me. NoI am rather chill, if any thing. Come, Siroutout, and, with the protecting air of a careful father, the precocious lad hurried me outside (334). The narrator soon discovers more than just inverted similitudes between Paradise and Tartarus, locating direct material connections between the two realms, as for example in the paper mills rag room: Where do you get such a host of rags? [I said] picking up a handful from a basket. Some from the country round about; some from far over sea Leghorn and London. Tis not unlikely, then, murmured I, that among these heaps of rags there may be some old shirts, gathered from the dormitories of the Paradise of Bachelors (330). The blank paper produced at the mill will in turn be used to make the kinds of documents that the bachelors undoubtedly handle in their legal profession: sermons, lawyers briefs, physicians prescriptions, love-letters, marriage certificates, bills of divorce, registers of births, death-warrants, and so on (333). Perhaps they will become copies of the Decameron, which the bachelors pleasantly turn over . . . ere retiring for the night (323). No coincidence, then, that the mills foreman is nicknamed Old Bach.30 The material connections between The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids suggest their dialectical interrelation. They demonstrate, in fact, that there is no person or order of events in the diptychs world that does not exist in an over-determined causal relationship with all others. The diptych evokes a global network of sexual, economic, and moral relationships, expanding its satiric range still farther than that of Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs. For while that diptych gestures toward the collapse of the medial space inhabited by its narrator (and reader), it is still possible to read the work as a condemnation of that narrator. In The Paradise of
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The name also suggests the sort of Hawthornean folk devil that we might expect to find in Tartarus. As Dimock argues, Melville is conventional, even tedious, in diabolizing industrial capitalism and effeminizing continental aristocracy. Yet he is also innovative in linking them within the same satiric economy.

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Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids, this interpretation is insufficient. The narrator, a seedsman with an insatiable demand for paper, is a surrogate for Melville.31 Like the seedsmans envelopes, Melvilles text is a manufactured paper object and therefore part of the vicious economy that it describes. As Thomas reminds us, the very pages we are holding might have been produced by an exploitative system (182). Nothing in the fictional world inside of the text or in the fiction-reading world outside of it escapes the range of its satire, which makes the diptychs reader as much a satiric target as its narrator. By purchasing the fictional contents of Melvilles paper envelopes, the reader becomes an unwitting participant in the economic exploitation of the factory maids. Reading, the feasting bachelors brag, does allow one to hobnob with Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb (NN PT 318), but it does not allow one to escape material entanglement. We may scoff at the narrators puerile endorsement of the bachelor lifestyle in the first half of the diptych. In the second half, the joke is on us.

Conclusion

elvilles diptych experiment anticipates what is currently called transatlantic criticism, and the rhetorical gambits it employs suggest three ways of conducting a transatlantic critique. Following Melvilles mode of ironic contrast in The Two Temples, transatlantic studies might serve as a tool within American Studies for exploring comparisons between American and British literature and culture with the primary purpose of deflating myths about the United States, in particular the tenacious myth of American exceptionalism. Furthermore, Melvilles method of reiterative doubling in Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs demonstrates that a transatlantic comparison can expose commonalities and shared contradictions within both American and British culture.32 As Paul Gilroy writes, a transatlantic perspective allows critics to break the dogmatic focus on discrete national dynamics which has characterized so much modern Euro-American cultural thought.33 Finally, the dialectically interconnective satiric mode of The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids suggests that a transatlantic comparison might trace the interconnected flow of capital and ideas in
Melville visited the Dalton mill to buy a large quantity of writing paper in January of 1851 and would have used the same route described in the diptych (Parker 1.810). Paul Giles calls Melvilles transatlantic method a style of comparative cosmopolitanism in Virtual Americas: Transatlantic Fictions and the Transatlantic Imaginary (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 86. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 6.

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the global economy, of which the United States and Britain are only a part. According to Gilroy, a transatlantic model can serve to generate intermediate concepts, lodged between the local and the global. Thus the establishment of a robust transatlantic criticism might be an initial step in the development of a literary and cultural criticism that aims to be as global as its objects of analysis. If, as Thomas argues, Melville intuited in 1853 that traditional narrative models were no longer adequate for depicting the effects of the global market, surely rigidly national critical models are today equally inefficient at doing so. This is not to deny the need for American Studies, but only to suggest that such a field cannot escape being globally situated.34 If criticism is situated within a global economy of capital and ideas, Melvilles self-reflexive technique in The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids is further instructive to the critic in that it brings to life the obvious but easily neglected truth that criticism (whether scholarly or satiric) cannot occur in a vacuum. As Fredric Bogel writes, satire is not simply a matter of sighted repellent object, sank same.35 Hence the best satires insist on the identification of author and reader with satiric object; Gullivers Travels is not written by horses, or for them. Melvilles social criticism, like Swifts, acknowledges that it commits many of the same sins it condemns. The expanding range of his three diptychsfrom the satire of the subject matter in The Two Temples, to the satire of the narrator in Poor Mans Pudding and Rich Mans Crumbs, to the satire of the work and its author in The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maidsheightens the stakes for readers and places them in dangerous proximity to a satiric explosion. Textual events, even dangerous ones, are eminently ignorable. If The Two Temples was too caustic to be printed in the progressive Putnams, how on earth did The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids sneak into the more cautious Harpers?36 Whether a text is trite hackwork or a sophisticated parody of trite hackwork is often a matter of debate. Any critic of Melvilles magazine fiction must ultimately confront this problem. But I cannot ignore the satiric explosion of The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus
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I find Amy Kaplans The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002) to be a particularly interesting approach in this direction. Fredric V. Bogel, The Difference Satire Makes: Rhetoric and Reading from Jonson to Byron (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001), 41. As Post-Lauria observes (175), Melville went out of his way to publish the potentially subversive diptych in Harpers when he could have chosen Putnams instead, as he had for Benito Cereno. On the other hand, the success of the diptych may have suggested to Melville that he could get tendentious material into print if he covered his tracks well enough; this is a lesson he had been slowly absorbing since the expurgation of Typee. Surely Dix & Edwards failed to note that The Confidence-Man identifies its protagonist simultaneously with Jesus and Satan.

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of Maids, nor can I paint its intriguing consequences on a single canvas. So allow me one last diptych. In one panel, Melvilles narrative is fatalistic. Having undermined itself, having identified authorship as equally complicit with anything that it might critique, it can only continue relentlessly, meaninglessly forward, like the machine in the paper mill, of which the narrator asks, Does it ever stopget clogged? and receives the response, No. It must go (333). The fatalistic text is a perfect bachelor. It does not even need to have a reader. It would prefer not to. In the other scenario, the text is moralistic. Stuttering to mean, it strikes out with its fist, but it bruises rather than kills. It does not suggest any particular course of action, but it does insist that its reader abandon the idea that reading alone is a moral act. Faced with this rhetorical provocation, the reader is forced to admit complicity and hence responsibility in the care-worn world. In calling attention to its own material presence, the moralistic text asks the reader to discard the delusion of bachelorhood. Yet the moralistic text, though it is present in the world, cannot itself act in the world. Only its reader escapes with the potential to act. Call him Ishmael.

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