In the short story The Tartarus of Maids, author Herman Melville seeks to portray a world that is completely mastered by machinery. Through the story, it is evident that Melville seeks to paint the impact that industrialization had on humanity. The factory and machinery are what is used to symbolically mean the human womb that produces products that are employed and wealthy and at the same time steal the lives and the very souls of the women who happen to be the ones who keep the machinery well oiled( Howard 48). It is therefore clear that the imagery that is used here bring out the ideas of birth, death, life and production. In the story, human life is subjected to the production of the “iron animal” and the machinery therefore becomes a tool that is used to create and destroy life.
The entire story shows the kind of relationship that exists between the machinery of industrialism and the labor that women go through at child birth. This is truly evident by the relationship that is created between the menstrual cycle and the Blood River he sees travel through the devil’s dungeon. He describes the color of the river to be brick red just like the color of the blood of the menstrual period. Also, the machinery is again given a comparison to a woman’s biological function through the elderly nurse who the young man who leads the narrator on the tour says that she is already left business. This clearly shows that due to her age, she no longer gives birth and that could be the reason why she is just seated at the machine end. Better still, because she is just seated at the end of the machine and there is no work or business for her, then it could mean that as a nurse, she no longer has a job to do meaning that she may have acted as a midwife (Zimiles & Zimiles 28).
It leaves a lot to be desired just to think that industry has replaced reproductive functions of women. The women in Melville’s story have been enslaved and their description is quite bleak just to imagine that they have been likened to John Locke’s paper analogy where a human mind, at birth is likened to a blank piece of paper. Melville insinuates that the piece of paper has overtaken the quality of life. Girls are described as blank looking, seated on blank looking counters with blank white folders in their blank hands (Arvin 30). There is no hope for these girls even when the papers are said to have a future because they might become bills, certificates and registers. By the mere fact that they are called girls, there seems to be no possibility of them becoming women in future because they have been enslaved by the industry.
There is an ironic note that lingers throughout the story. While the women are described with the use of fatalistic terms, the few men who are there are very opposite of them. The women are described as being cogs in the machine; the men are very healthy (Goloboy 92). The girls are described as pale cheeked too when the first man seen, aside from the narrator is of dark complexion. Cupid is also depicted as being very healthy and lively. When he is likened to the goldfish, it is no doubt that he is high spirited, lively and colorful unlike the face of the women that we see. It is no doubt that the women who keep running the industrial machinery for production purposes just like they keep giving birth (Fisher 128).
Works Cited
Arvin, Newton. Herman Melville. New York: Vintage. 1957
Fisher, Marvin. Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. 1977
Goloboy, Jennifer. Industrial revolution: People and Perspectives. Santa Barbara: ABC- CLIO. 2008
Howard, Leon. Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1951
Melville, Herman. ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’, in Lee, A. Robert ed (1993). Billy Budd, Sailor, and Other Stories. London: J. M. Dent.1993
Zimiles, Martha & Zimiles Murray. Early American Mills. New York: Clarkson N. Potter. 1973
