Domestic Assault in the Story of Hawthorne and Melville The Bachelor's Paradise masculinity that has hindered the development of classically intellectual and original literature in favor of the saccharine and uniform one. While Hawthorne and Melville's short story "The Bachelor's Paradise" shows both domestic residences under assault from a sentimentalizing feminine influence, their respective atmospheres emerge from a different set of authorial concerns. Hawthorne's anxiety comes from a defensive standpoint. He casually sees the feminization of the home as a symbolic castration of male authority and a denial of the strong ethic of writing (assuming we consider the work of writing an “ethic,” since it was, and still is, a recreational activity in contrast to traditional work). Melville, while addressing some of Hawthorne's concerns about the origins of this problem in "The Bachelor's Paradise," finds the effects of sentimentality in "The Maids' Tartarus" more convincing. A more subtle version of Hawthorne's castration, writing becomes a mode of mechanical reproduction, a repetitive imprint of mass-produced emotions. From Melville's sterility to Hawthorne's impotence the step is only one, but irreversible, as Hawthorne manages to prescribe an anti-domestic Viagra, while the diffusion in Melville's story occurs only metaphorically in the production and distribution of paper (the problem itself to start with), and not in a reseeding of sterile pages. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Hawthorne opens by describing the foundations of the Pyncheon house, historical and physical. To challenge the curse of witchcraft - female association, despite Matthew Maule's position - which looms over the house, Colonel Pyncheon arms himself with masculine traits and actions which will then recur as increasingly sexualized images: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, held together by severe rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed his original design, probably without even imagining an objection to it" (4). Hawthorne contrasts this iron structure with the literary world. Consider Pyncheon's portrait: "...holding a Bible in one hand, and in the other raising the hilt of an iron sword. The latter object, being most successfully depicted by the artist, stood out much more prominent compared to the sacred volume" (23). Since Pyncheon was given a second screen by the artist's hand (or a third, if we include Hawthorne's role), the choice to emphasize the sword may be the result of the painter's, and not Pyncheon's, notions of masculinity. In any case, the sword may be mightier than the pen but, so far, not at the expense of the pen. Melville, however, finds the pen lacking and echoes Hawthorne's imagery of a solid, flaccid masculinity: "But the iron heel is changed to a patent boot; the long two-handed sword for a one-handed pen " (204). We must return to the scene of Pyncheon's death to locate the antecedent of this transformation. Hawthorne follows the path of the wind, described as "a loud sigh," over the even more effeminate audience, whose sex becomes indeterminate by their adornments: "It rustled the silk dresses of the ladies and stirred the long locks of the gentlemen's wigs" (8 ). We see the cliff from which Pyncheon fell. Sitting under his sword-wielding portrait (the reader does not yet learn the subject), he comesinterrupted by death at the moment of writing, frozen "with a pen in his hand" and with "[L]etters, parchments and blank sheets of paper" before him (8-9). The blank sheets gain importance with Melville, but for now the central image is that of an oppressive domesticity that usurps that of Pyncheon. Once an iron patriarchal authority. Just as Pyncheon is prevented from writing and thus silenced, so Hawthorne must appease the sensitized reader with a playful but biting critique of political correctness: "Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon... has begun what would be a mockery best described as l adornment of her person. Far be it from us the indecency of witnessing, even with our imagination, a lady's toilet!" (21) The double use of the words "vestire", "ornament" and "indecorum" (as "unsuitable", a sartorial pun, but also extracting the Latin roots of "decor-us") reminds us that in Hawthorne is prevented from "addressing" the female act of dressing through the feminization of literature - and recalls another obsolete and self-conscious meaning of "decency": that which is proper "especially in dramatic, literary or artistic composition" (OED, 1a) . If the writer is unable to describe his art without euphemisms, what chance do the characters he creates have? Melville also comments indirectly on this fact. During the Epicurean banquet, the narrator interrupts his ridiculous description of the food four times ("its pleasant flavor dispelled my first mistake concerning its chief ingredient") with parenthetical justifications for the bachelors' consumption of alcohol: " (By way of ceremony, simply, just to keep up the good old fashion, here we each drank a glass of good old port)" (206-207). The parentheses may produce increasing comic effect, but the underlying moral evasions on the part of the narrator force the reader to question his responding chuckle. But Hawthorne's narrator may step aside, as Hepzibah contributes more to the castration of the house. A “time-struck virgin,” she simultaneously displays fear of the phallus and curiosity about sex (24). The chairs in the Colonel's room continue the motif of stiff, sexualized objects from his time, and their description shows how Hepzibah might view them: "Half a dozen chairs stood around the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person to the point of being annoying even to the eye" (23). Hepzibah reacts to her phallic fear by appropriating the male role in sex and overturning the fact that she has taken little part in the "relationships and pleasures" of life (21). his interaction with the interiority of the house is full of further sexual puns that require a Freudian interpretation: first, each drawer of the tall old-fashioned dresser must be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic gasps; then everything will have to close again, with the same restless reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks; a step of steps back and forth across the room...We heard a key being turned in a small lock... (21 -22)The act of intercourse recreated through her domestic and dominant machinations, Hepzibah's efforts end up finding the treasured image of an effeminate man whose sensuous features "seem to indicate not so much a capacity for thought as a gentle emotion and voluptuous" (22). She clearly prefers an absence of intellectuality to an abundance of sentimentality, but how does Hepzibah emasculate the male presence within the house? The opening of the shop seems like the final downfall for the once proud Pyncheon house, and we can trace Hepzibah's sexual anxieties as a virgin womanas part of his duties as a shopkeeper. He experiences an unwanted orgasmic reaction to the entry of a customer through the door, equipped with a bell: This bell... was so contrived that it vibrated by means of a steel spring, and thus alerted the innermost regions of the house when any customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly, spiteful little racket (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since the wig-wearing predecessor retired from business) immediately set every nerve in his body into reactive, tumultuous vibration. (30) Aside from the numerous allusions to virginity and the vagina, it is also important to note that the first client is a man - and Holgrave, for that matter, is quite the opposite of her beloved young man in the portrait. As the owner of the virago, we see Hepzibah recast as the witch from Hansel and Gretel. First, Hawthorne repeatedly points out his poor eyesight (22, 24, 27), a trait common to witches as detailed in the Grimm tale. The similarities in the prose are too perfect to ignore; “her rigid and dark intellect,” Hepzibah's seizure of the male mind through the “rigid” motif, is perplexed as to “how to tempt young boys on her premises” (26). The details coincide almost perfectly, with Hepzibah and the gingerbread house witch trapping the children with the same food, but with Hepzibah's candy meeting an inevitable and voluntary death: now place a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with such a trembling expression. touch that it tumbles to the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it stopped being an elephant and became a few pieces of moldy gingerbread. (26) The elephant loses its elephantine essence through Hepzibah's "tremulous" dismembering touch, an action that I consider to be as unconsciously intentional as a literal Freudian slip. He did the same with the house, dismembering its masculinity through his sexual anxiety and blocking all literary irrigation through his patriarchal arrogance. Melville takes these truths as self-evident and moves on to a finer exploration of the ramifications of female authority. in the second half of his diptych with "The Tartarus of the Handmaids". The white treatment of the blank page calls to mind Paul Valry's explanation of why he could not write novels: "I could never begin to look at a blank sheet of paper and start writing 'The Duchess went out at five'". We can now consider this example in light of the Hemingway-influenced bastardization of journalistic style in the 20th century, but the anxiety to deface pure white paper, resplendent with poetic potential, with factual, fictional writing was not the primary concern at the time. by Melville. More destructive was the mechanical, iterative sentimentality that filled those blank pages and calls attention to this treatment of emptiness in a paragraph that recounts the narrator's seemingly mundane movements: So, covering my horse and piling my buffalo on the top of the cover. , and tucking the edges tightly around the breastplate and breeches, so that the wind would not strip him naked, I tied him securely and ran limping towards the factory door, stiffened by the frost and encumbered by my driver's dreaded chauffeur. . (215)The six alliterative words that begin with "b" (and two different parts of speech that derive from "blank") anticipate the six instances of "blank" two paragraphs later for the female workers, but also foreshadow the narrator's gradual progression towards emptiness and verbal sterility. He too is deprived of his ability to create new linguistic configurations in the suffocating, and non-poetic, assonance of the piece - it is he, after all, who runs "lame", it is"stiff" only because of the cold, and ends up being "bulky". Of Billy Budd, Barbara Johnson writes that the plot "could conceivably be seen as a consequence not of what Claggart does but of what he doesn't say." Likewise, the emptiness here – and the fact that “[T]he human voice was banished from the place” – highlights the lack of male presence and diminished authority. Masculinity survives only in the form of the predatory sexual imagery of "heavy iron, with a vertical thing like a piston rising and falling periodically on a heavy block of wood", but the imprint is of a wreath of roses - sentimental and repetitive (215 ). The traditionally antithetical terms of mechanization and femininity begin their confluence here, and the word “periodically” sets the stage for the advancement of this conceit. Cupid points out that the pulp swims "round and round" in the vats, and the factory owner refuses to employ married women because "they are apt to be too casual" (218, 222). Stress, regularity and cyclicality find fulfillment in the catamenic imagery of mechanical reproduction. The waterwheel that starts (“This sets all our machinery in motion”) is itself set in motion by the “turbid waters of the Blood River,” and the paper-making hall is “suffocating with a strange blood-like odor ". abdominal heat" (216, 218). But menstrual associations favor a climate of sterile creation: menstruation is the paradoxical sign of a fertile body that, at least in the previous month, has resisted fertilization. This is why the narrator confused finds "'strange that red waters become pale paper, I mean'" (217) Any doubts that Melville is drawing an explicit parallel between papermaking and pregnancy are dispelled when Cupid reveals the process from gestation to expulsion. from the metaphorical vaginal canal takes not nine months, but minutes, and ends with the umbilical cord's release of a "scissor sound... of a cord being broken" (220). human mind at birth and a blank sheet of paper” as “something meant to be scribbled on” consolidates the conceit, but Melville problematizes transference by showing that, in reality, little passes from progenitor to child under these sterile auspices (221). The narrator marks a piece of evidence, not with his name, since he apparently has no identity to speak of, but with that of Cupid - and who, nine minutes later, returns with "my 'Cupid' half faded of it" (220). The ownership is dubious; the narrator claims to own the paper, although Cupid's name is (barely) printed on it. As in the case of the Pyncheon carpet, "originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite faded into an indistinguishable hue" (Hawthorne often uses "texture" as a signifier of something written), the identity is erased (Hawthorne 23). The resulting dilution and confusion of literary identity leaves the machine as the only certain “writer,” an author whose mechanical reproduction eliminates the human touch and progressive authority in favor of cloying strike and stalled intellect. Please note: This is just an example Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay The narrator's only option is to leave the factory and there the story ends. Hawthorne, however, finds the solution in escape. Clifford's development is itself a metaphor for the emasculating effects of home. Man-child in reality, Clifford is reduced to the role of a child in his dreams, the illustration of which carries the signifiers of Hawthorne's textuality: "But the moonlight.

Topic > Domestic Assault in the Story of Hawthorne and Melville The Bachelor's Paradise masculinity that has hindered the development of classically intellectual and original literature in favor of the saccharine and uniform one. While Hawthorne and Melville's short story "The Bachelor's Paradise" shows both domestic residences under assault from a sentimentalizing feminine influence, their respective atmospheres emerge from a different set of authorial concerns. Hawthorne's anxiety comes from a defensive standpoint. He casually sees the feminization of the home as a symbolic castration of male authority and a denial of the strong ethic of writing (assuming we consider the work of writing an “ethic,” since it was, and still is, a recreational activity in contrast to traditional work). Melville, while addressing some of Hawthorne's concerns about the origins of this problem in "The Bachelor's Paradise," finds the effects of sentimentality in "The Maids' Tartarus" more convincing. A more subtle version of Hawthorne's castration, writing becomes a mode of mechanical reproduction, a repetitive imprint of mass-produced emotions. From Melville's sterility to Hawthorne's impotence the step is only one, but irreversible, as Hawthorne manages to prescribe an anti-domestic Viagra, while the diffusion in Melville's story occurs only metaphorically in the production and distribution of paper (the problem itself to start with), and not in a reseeding of sterile pages. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Hawthorne opens by describing the foundations of the Pyncheon house, historical and physical. To challenge the curse of witchcraft - female association, despite Matthew Maule's position - which looms over the house, Colonel Pyncheon arms himself with masculine traits and actions which will then recur as increasingly sexualized images: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, held together by severe rigidity of purpose, as with iron clamps, he followed his original design, probably without even imagining an objection to it" (4). Hawthorne contrasts this iron structure with the literary world. Consider Pyncheon's portrait: "...holding a Bible in one hand, and in the other raising the hilt of an iron sword. The latter object, being most successfully depicted by the artist, stood out much more prominent compared to the sacred volume" (23). Since Pyncheon was given a second screen by the artist's hand (or a third, if we include Hawthorne's role), the choice to emphasize the sword may be the result of the painter's, and not Pyncheon's, notions of masculinity. In any case, the sword may be mightier than the pen but, so far, not at the expense of the pen. Melville, however, finds the pen lacking and echoes Hawthorne's imagery of a solid, flaccid masculinity: "But the iron heel is changed to a patent boot; the long two-handed sword for a one-handed pen " (204). We must return to the scene of Pyncheon's death to locate the antecedent of this transformation. Hawthorne follows the path of the wind, described as "a loud sigh," over the even more effeminate audience, whose sex becomes indeterminate by their adornments: "It rustled the silk dresses of the ladies and stirred the long locks of the gentlemen's wigs" (8 ). We see the cliff from which Pyncheon fell. Sitting under his sword-wielding portrait (the reader does not yet learn the subject), he comesinterrupted by death at the moment of writing, frozen "with a pen in his hand" and with "[L]etters, parchments and blank sheets of paper" before him (8-9). The blank sheets gain importance with Melville, but for now the central image is that of an oppressive domesticity that usurps that of Pyncheon. Once an iron patriarchal authority. Just as Pyncheon is prevented from writing and thus silenced, so Hawthorne must appease the sensitized reader with a playful but biting critique of political correctness: "Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon... has begun what would be a mockery best described as l adornment of her person. Far be it from us the indecency of witnessing, even with our imagination, a lady's toilet!" (21) The double use of the words "vestire", "ornament" and "indecorum" (as "unsuitable", a sartorial pun, but also extracting the Latin roots of "decor-us") reminds us that in Hawthorne is prevented from "addressing" the female act of dressing through the feminization of literature - and recalls another obsolete and self-conscious meaning of "decency": that which is proper "especially in dramatic, literary or artistic composition" (OED, 1a) . If the writer is unable to describe his art without euphemisms, what chance do the characters he creates have? Melville also comments indirectly on this fact. During the Epicurean banquet, the narrator interrupts his ridiculous description of the food four times ("its pleasant flavor dispelled my first mistake concerning its chief ingredient") with parenthetical justifications for the bachelors' consumption of alcohol: " (By way of ceremony, simply, just to keep up the good old fashion, here we each drank a glass of good old port)" (206-207). The parentheses may produce increasing comic effect, but the underlying moral evasions on the part of the narrator force the reader to question his responding chuckle. But Hawthorne's narrator may step aside, as Hepzibah contributes more to the castration of the house. A “time-struck virgin,” she simultaneously displays fear of the phallus and curiosity about sex (24). The chairs in the Colonel's room continue the motif of stiff, sexualized objects from his time, and their description shows how Hepzibah might view them: "Half a dozen chairs stood around the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously contrived for the discomfort of the human person to the point of being annoying even to the eye" (23). Hepzibah reacts to her phallic fear by appropriating the male role in sex and overturning the fact that she has taken little part in the "relationships and pleasures" of life (21). his interaction with the interiority of the house is full of further sexual puns that require a Freudian interpretation: first, each drawer of the tall old-fashioned dresser must be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic gasps; then everything will have to close again, with the same restless reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks; a step of steps back and forth across the room...We heard a key being turned in a small lock... (21 -22)The act of intercourse recreated through her domestic and dominant machinations, Hepzibah's efforts end up finding the treasured image of an effeminate man whose sensuous features "seem to indicate not so much a capacity for thought as a gentle emotion and voluptuous" (22). She clearly prefers an absence of intellectuality to an abundance of sentimentality, but how does Hepzibah emasculate the male presence within the house? The opening of the shop seems like the final downfall for the once proud Pyncheon house, and we can trace Hepzibah's sexual anxieties as a virgin womanas part of his duties as a shopkeeper. He experiences an unwanted orgasmic reaction to the entry of a customer through the door, equipped with a bell: This bell... was so contrived that it vibrated by means of a steel spring, and thus alerted the innermost regions of the house when any customer should cross the threshold. Its ugly, spiteful little racket (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since the wig-wearing predecessor retired from business) immediately set every nerve in his body into reactive, tumultuous vibration. (30) Aside from the numerous allusions to virginity and the vagina, it is also important to note that the first client is a man - and Holgrave, for that matter, is quite the opposite of her beloved young man in the portrait. As the owner of the virago, we see Hepzibah recast as the witch from Hansel and Gretel. First, Hawthorne repeatedly points out his poor eyesight (22, 24, 27), a trait common to witches as detailed in the Grimm tale. The similarities in the prose are too perfect to ignore; “her rigid and dark intellect,” Hepzibah's seizure of the male mind through the “rigid” motif, is perplexed as to “how to tempt young boys on her premises” (26). The details coincide almost perfectly, with Hepzibah and the gingerbread house witch trapping the children with the same food, but with Hepzibah's candy meeting an inevitable and voluntary death: now place a gingerbread elephant against the window, but with such a trembling expression. touch that it tumbles to the floor, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it stopped being an elephant and became a few pieces of moldy gingerbread. (26) The elephant loses its elephantine essence through Hepzibah's "tremulous" dismembering touch, an action that I consider to be as unconsciously intentional as a literal Freudian slip. He did the same with the house, dismembering its masculinity through his sexual anxiety and blocking all literary irrigation through his patriarchal arrogance. Melville takes these truths as self-evident and moves on to a finer exploration of the ramifications of female authority. in the second half of his diptych with "The Tartarus of the Handmaids". The white treatment of the blank page calls to mind Paul Valry's explanation of why he could not write novels: "I could never begin to look at a blank sheet of paper and start writing 'The Duchess went out at five'". We can now consider this example in light of the Hemingway-influenced bastardization of journalistic style in the 20th century, but the anxiety to deface pure white paper, resplendent with poetic potential, with factual, fictional writing was not the primary concern at the time. by Melville. More destructive was the mechanical, iterative sentimentality that filled those blank pages and calls attention to this treatment of emptiness in a paragraph that recounts the narrator's seemingly mundane movements: So, covering my horse and piling my buffalo on the top of the cover. , and tucking the edges tightly around the breastplate and breeches, so that the wind would not strip him naked, I tied him securely and ran limping towards the factory door, stiffened by the frost and encumbered by my driver's dreaded chauffeur. . (215)The six alliterative words that begin with "b" (and two different parts of speech that derive from "blank") anticipate the six instances of "blank" two paragraphs later for the female workers, but also foreshadow the narrator's gradual progression towards emptiness and verbal sterility. He too is deprived of his ability to create new linguistic configurations in the suffocating, and non-poetic, assonance of the piece - it is he, after all, who runs "lame", it is"stiff" only because of the cold, and ends up being "bulky". Of Billy Budd, Barbara Johnson writes that the plot "could conceivably be seen as a consequence not of what Claggart does but of what he doesn't say." Likewise, the emptiness here – and the fact that “[T]he human voice was banished from the place” – highlights the lack of male presence and diminished authority. Masculinity survives only in the form of the predatory sexual imagery of "heavy iron, with a vertical thing like a piston rising and falling periodically on a heavy block of wood", but the imprint is of a wreath of roses - sentimental and repetitive (215 ). The traditionally antithetical terms of mechanization and femininity begin their confluence here, and the word “periodically” sets the stage for the advancement of this conceit. Cupid points out that the pulp swims "round and round" in the vats, and the factory owner refuses to employ married women because "they are apt to be too casual" (218, 222). Stress, regularity and cyclicality find fulfillment in the catamenic imagery of mechanical reproduction. The waterwheel that starts (“This sets all our machinery in motion”) is itself set in motion by the “turbid waters of the Blood River,” and the paper-making hall is “suffocating with a strange blood-like odor ". abdominal heat" (216, 218). But menstrual associations favor a climate of sterile creation: menstruation is the paradoxical sign of a fertile body that, at least in the previous month, has resisted fertilization. This is why the narrator confused finds "'strange that red waters become pale paper, I mean'" (217) Any doubts that Melville is drawing an explicit parallel between papermaking and pregnancy are dispelled when Cupid reveals the process from gestation to expulsion. from the metaphorical vaginal canal takes not nine months, but minutes, and ends with the umbilical cord's release of a "scissor sound... of a cord being broken" (220). human mind at birth and a blank sheet of paper” as “something meant to be scribbled on” consolidates the conceit, but Melville problematizes transference by showing that, in reality, little passes from progenitor to child under these sterile auspices (221). The narrator marks a piece of evidence, not with his name, since he apparently has no identity to speak of, but with that of Cupid - and who, nine minutes later, returns with "my 'Cupid' half faded of it" (220). The ownership is dubious; the narrator claims to own the paper, although Cupid's name is (barely) printed on it. As in the case of the Pyncheon carpet, "originally of rich texture, but so worn and faded in these latter years that its once brilliant figure had quite faded into an indistinguishable hue" (Hawthorne often uses "texture" as a signifier of something written), the identity is erased (Hawthorne 23). The resulting dilution and confusion of literary identity leaves the machine as the only certain “writer,” an author whose mechanical reproduction eliminates the human touch and progressive authority in favor of cloying strike and stalled intellect. Please note: This is just an example Get a custom paper from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay The narrator's only option is to leave the factory and there the story ends. Hawthorne, however, finds the solution in escape. Clifford's development is itself a metaphor for the emasculating effects of home. Man-child in reality, Clifford is reduced to the role of a child in his dreams, the illustration of which carries the signifiers of Hawthorne's textuality: "But the moonlight.