"BARTLEBY": THE WALLS OF WALL STREET*



                              BY JAMES C. WILSON

The meaning of "Bartleby" has proven as elusive as Ahab's white whale. Since Melville's literary resurrection in the 1920s, many critics have read "Bartleby" as an allegory of Melville's own plight as an artist in nineteenth-century America.¹ The story of the scrivener or law copyist imprisoned by walls adequately reflects Melville's own situation in 1853 when he was writing "Bartleby," or so the theory goes. Also, Melville came to see his own work as Bartleby's dead letters after the failure of Pierre in 1851. The contemporary reviewers savagely attacked Pierre for its morbidity and its alleged immorality and went so far as to question Melville's very sanity. The novel was a disaster financially as well as critically; in fact, eight months after its release, only 283 copies of an edition of 2,310 had been sold. Dollars damned him, as he wrote to Hawthorne in June of 1851, and the critics damned him too. And Melville, facing the need to provide for his increasing family, turned to writing magazine fiction for Putnam's Monthly. "Bartleby, the Scrivener" was the first of these short stories and his masterpiece in the genre.

In its sixty-year critical history "Bartleby" has been subjected to every conceivable interpretation, most having concentrated on the character of Bartleby.² Such interpretations seem rather arbitrary, considering the obvious fact that Melville does not provide the reader with sufficient information to understand the scrivener. To interpret "Bartleby," one must first account for Melville's narrative strategy in having the lawyer tell the story. From the beginning the lawyer confesses his inability to understand Bartleby, whom he refers to as "one of those beings of whom nothing is ascertainable"³ and for whom "no materials exist, for a full and satisfactory biography" (p. 19). The narrator, limited by his profession and the legal logic of his imagination, proves unable to comprehend the mysterious Bartleby. As R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., argues in The Method of Melville's Short Fiction, "no interpretation of Bartleby offered by the lawyer could ever be complete, for the scrivener is a phenomenon totally alien to the narrator's experience and sensibilities."⁴ The result is that controlled ambiguity for which Melville is notorious.

The narrative of "Bartleby" reads like an argument, as if the lawyer in rationalizing and justifying his behavior toward Bartleby were arguing his case before a court of readers. "Bartleby" was originally subtitled "A Story of Wall-Street," and this particular lawyer provides the perfect spokesman for Wall Street. He describes himself as "an eminently safe man" (p. 20), an unambitious lawyer who does "a snug business among rich men's bonds and mortgages, and title-deeds" (p. 20). He lacks any concern for Justice and does not "indulge in dangerous indignation at wrongs and outrages" (p. 20); instead he possesses "a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best" (p. 20). Furthermore, he proudly announces his connection with John Jacob Astor, a name synonymous with American big business and which, in the lawyer's words, "rings like unto bullion" (p. 20). His admiration of Astor reveals much about his character, for as William Bysshe Stein points out in "Bartleby: The Christian Conscience," "John Jacob Astor, the high priest of financial duplicity, incarnates the ruling ethic of callous self-interest."⁵

Even as the lawyer begins to relate the "strangest" story of Bartleby, he cannot help going off on a tangent and remarks rather bitterly about a Master in Chancery office that was taken from him when a new state constitution eliminated the office. "I had counted upon a life-lease of the profits, whereas I only received those of a few short years" (p. 20), he says, referring to his loss as a "premature act," a "sudden and violent abrogation" (p. 20) of his profits. The lawyer, like John Jacob Astor, and like the economic system that the two men represent, is motivated essentially by profit.

In a passage that foreshadows his inability to comprehend Bartleby, the lawyer describes his other employees as mere caricatures. Quite simply, the lawyer finds himself incapable of seeing his workers in any more depth. However, Turkey and Nippers, the two scriveners, have both demonstrated their usefulness to him in spite of their idiosyncracies. He refers to Turkey as a "most valuable person to me" (p. 22) and to Nippers as "a very useful man to me" (p. 25). Even Ginger Nut, the office boy, is useful in that "his duty as cake and apple purveyor" (p. 27) pacifies Turkey and Nippers and thus keeps them working. In other words, the lawyer considers his employees useful insofar as he can exploit them and make money from their labor.

When additional work comes into the office, the lawyer decides that he must "push" the clerks already with him and hire a third scrivener. The third scrivener turns out to be Bartleby, whom the lawyer describes as a "motionless young man," "pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn!" (p. 27). The lawyer hires Bartleby after a few words concerning his "qualifications," words that the lawyer never discloses to the reader. Just as he presents his other employees as caricatures, so he presents Bartleby as a one-dimensional, "incurably forlorn" waif. But we must remember that these characters are his creations, creations that allow him to rationalize his behavior toward them. In other words, by presenting Bartleby as a pathological case, suffering from an "incurable disorder," the lawyer diminishes his responsibility for Bartleby. Or at least he tries to convince himself and the reader of this.

The lawyer can be said to be an unreliable narrator in that he creates the story in order to justify his behavior toward Bartleby.⁶ This results in the tonal irony of the story, which serves to indict the lawyer and all that he represents. For "Bartleby" functions as an indictment of Wall Street--Wall Street being the very heart, as well as the symbol, of American capitalism. The lawyer-narrator unwittingly exposes Wall Street and its new religion of materialism, of which he and John Jacob Astor are members of a kind of priestly caste. As becomes evident in the course of the narrative, this new religion posits money as its only value, expediency and self-interest as its only morality.

When Bartleby comes to work for the lawyer he confronts these walls of Wall Street. Bartleby finds "a solitary office, upstairs, of a building entirely unhallowed by humanising domestic associations" (p. 52), a building "deficient in what the landscape painters call 'life"' (p. 21). The few windows in the office look out on stone and brick walls, symbolically restricting any possible view of the world outside. Moreover, the lawyer finds what he calls a "satisfactory arrangement" by placing Bartleby behind a "folding-screen, which might entirely isolate Bartleby from my sight, though not remove him from my voice" (p. 28). Thus the walls reflect the division of this particular society into two distinct classes: the property owners and the propertyless workers.

At first Bartleby does an "extraordinary quantity of writing" (p. 28), according to the lawyer. He works "silently, palely, mechanically" (p. 28) until the day he informs the lawyer that he "prefers" not to proofread copy, the tedious duplication of previously duplicated work. As the lawyer himself admits, verification or copy examination constitutes "a very dull, wearisome, and lethargic affair" (p. 29). Confused, the lawyer says: "Had there been the least uneasiness, anger, impatience, or impertinence in his manner. . . . I should have violently dismissed him from the premises" (p. 30). In other words, if Bartleby had presented any serious threat of insubordination, any revolutionary threat to disrupt the class structure of the office, the lawyer would have disposed of him. But Bartleby is no threat, and the lawyer says that he would as soon throw out his plaster-of-paris bust of Cicero as he would Bartleby.⁷ By his comparison, he reduces Bartleby to the status of an object, a commodity.

Here begins a pattern that the lawyer will repeat in each of his confrontations with Bartleby. As William B. Dillingham points out in Melville's Short Fiction, the lawyer reacts to Bartleby's refusals with indecisiveness, then backs down or retreats from the challenge, and finally rationalizes his behavior.⁸ The lawyer repeats this pattern in his second confrontation with Bartleby, this time carrying his rationalization a step further. He convinces himself that he can "cheaply purchase a delicious self-approval" (p. 34) by befriending Bartleby and by not having him thrown out into a society that he knows is not kind to vagrants. "To befriend Bartleby; to humour him in his strange wilfulness, will cost me little or nothing" (p. 34), he says. The key word here is "cost": everything becomes a matter of profit and loss. The lawyer measures his sense of morality, as well as his conscience, in terms of how much it will cost him.

Bartleby counts for no more than a commodity in the lawyer's office. But he prefers not to be one, which makes him the "forlornest" of mankind. The lawyer describes him as a "lean, penniless wight" (p. 36), one who spends all his days copying for "four cents a folio (one hundred words)" (p. 36). He cannot escape from the work place; in fact, the lawyer eventually discovers that he lives at the office, among the emptiness of Wall Street. As the lawyer says, "what miserable friendlessness and loneliness are here revealed! His poverty is great; but his solitude, how horrible! Think of it. Of a Sunday, Wall Street is deserted as Petra; and every night of every day it is an emptiness" (pp. 39-40). Like "Marius brooding among the ruins of Carthage" (p. 40), Bartleby lives among the walls of Wall Street.

With his "dead wall" reveries, Bartleby provides a classic example of alienated man, though the exact nature of his alienation remains a mystery to the lawyer and thus to the reader. However, it would seem probable that his alienation results from the dehumanizing experience of Wall Street, from the prison of his socioeconomic system, which the lawyer's narrative renders in very precise detail. In this sense, Bartleby's tragedy is that he does not become conscious of the social causes of his alienation: he finds himself unable to make the connection between the office where he works and Wall Street in general, between his own individual alienation and the class alienation of the propertyless workers. In capitulating to and embracing nothing but the wall in his own consciousness, Bartleby thereby fails to see his own condition within the context of other human lives and of their shared society. His rebellion is simply and finally silence: it is a negation.

The other employees mirror Bartleby's lack of consciousness. In fact, when he refuses to do his part of the copying, their reactions are, without exception, hostile. Turkey actually supports the lawyer, while Nippers says angrily, "I think I should kick him out of the office" (p. 32), and Ginger Nut adds, "I think, sir, he's a little luny" (p. 32). Later, Turkey goes so far as to threaten Bartleby physically when he says, "I think I'll just step behind his screen, and black his eyes for him!" (p. 35). Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut are even less conscious of their conditions as slaves than Bartleby.

When the lawyer realizes that Bartleby actually lives in the office, he first reacts with a "fraternal melancholy." "The bond of a common humanity now drew me irresistibly to gloom" (p 40), he says. But the melancholy quickly turns into fear and revulsion at "such perverseness--such unreasonableness'' (p 37). He argues, rather unconvincingly, that his disgust comes not from "the inherent selfishness of the human heart," but rather from the "hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill" (p. 42). He further rationalizes by deciding that Bartleby has become "the victim of innate and incurable disorder. I might give alms to his body; but his body did not pain him; it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach" (p. 42). And thus, after abstracting Bartleby beyond "reach," he decides to dismiss him, but only after giving him a twenty-dollar bill to ease his conscience.

The lawyer doesn't actually ask Bartleby to leave until the scrivener announces that he has "permanently given up copying" (p. 46). At this point Bartleby has outlived his usefulness to the lawyer: "In plain fact, he had now become a millstone to me, not only useless as a necklace, but afflictive to bear" (p. 46). So the lawyer offers Bartleby money (which is his primary response to Bartleby's human needs throughout the story) and orders him to leave within six days. However, Bartleby neither takes the money nor leaves, and the outraged lawyer responds with one of his most revealing statements: "What earthly right have you to stay here? Do you pay any rent? Do you pay my taxes? Or is this property yours?" (p. 51). Again. the lawyer reduces morality to a question of money, of ownership, and of private property. Bartleby has neither money nor property, and therefore he has no rights on Wall Street.

In the scene that follows the lawyer supresses his rage and allows Bartleby to remain. He does this out of fear: he fears the consequences of losing his temper while alone with the scrivener, recalling a similar dispute between Colt and Adams, which resulted in the death of the former. And yet as soon as he admits his fear, he once again finds it necessary to rationalize his inaction, his inability to rid himself of Bartleby. Here we see the lawyer's mind at work: "But when this old Adam of resentment rose in me and tempted me concerning Bartleby, I grappled him and threw him. How? Why, simply by recalling the divine injunction [to love one another]" (p. 52). And he concludes that "Mere self-interest, then, if no better motive can be enlisted, should ... prompt all beings to charity and philanthropy" (p. 52).

Some days later the lawyer further rationalizes his conduct by convincing himself that Bartleby has been predestined by a Calvinistic God to test him: "I slid [like a reptile(?)] into the persuasion that these troubles of mine, touching the scrivener, had been all predestinated from eternity, and Bartleby was billeted upon me for some mysterious purpose of an all-wise Providence" (p. 53). Here the lawyer exposes the socioeconomic system for exactly what it is: a self-enclosed, self-justifying system. Self-interest can be justified by capitalism and its Calvinistic religion, which in turn can be justified by self-interest. The lawyer, and all those like him, can slide in and out of any "persuasion" they like and still be able to justify themselves to one another. On Wall Street, economy and religion are one and the same.

As usual, however, the lawyer's resolve proves to be tenuous. Even the grandiose rationalization of being "predestinated from eternity" does not prevent the lawyer from changing his mind when his professional acquaintances begin to gossip about the strangeness of Bartleby's presence in his office. He realizes that his professional reputation has come in danger of being scandalized by these "unsolicited and uncharitable remarks" (p. 53). And what's more, he also fears the possibility that Bartleby might outlive him and "claim possession of my office by right of his perpetual occupancy" (p. 54). In other words, Bartleby might upsurp his position and thereby infringe upon the well-defined class structure of Wall Street.

Now that Bartleby has become a question of economic life and death, the lawyer must finally act. Still, he will not "dishonor" himself by throwing Bartleby out the door. No, he says in a statement that hints of Bartleby's eventual fate, he would rather "let him live and die here, and then mason up his remains in the wall" (p. 55). He flirts with and then gives up on the idea of calling the constable and having Bartleby taken to jail because he cannot think of a viable reason to "procure" this service. Finally, desperately, he attempts to solve his problem by moving out of his office and thereby escaping Bartleby. Once again he offers the scrivener money: "'I am going--good-bye; and God some way bless you; and take that,' slipping something in his hand" (p. 56). And once again, Bartleby refuses his money.

But the lawyer errs in thinking that he has seen the last of Bartleby. The new tenant, also a lawyer (what else?), requests that he return and persuade Bartleby to quit the premises, declaring "you are responsible for the man you left there. He refuses to do any copying; he refuses to do anything" (p. 57). The second lawyer holds him not morally. but economically responsible for Bartleby, as if the scrivener were so much baggage to be disposed of. Yet the narrator denies even this responsibility for Bartleby, saying "the man you allude to is nothing to me--he is no relation or apprentice of mine, that you should hold me reponsible for him" (p. 57)

The new tenant finally blackmails the lawyer by threatening to "expose" him in the papers. So the lawyer, "fearful . . . of being hunted out" (p. 60), returns to his old building to confront Bartleby. Still acting out of self-interest, he tells the scrivener that he must "do" something. The choices he suggests reveal the narrow limits of the lawyer's imagination: 1) to reengage in copying for someone; 2) to take a clerkship in a dry goods store; 3) to be a bartender; 4) to travel through the country collecting bills for the merchants; and 5) to go to Europe, to entertain some young gentleman with his conversation. All but the last are typical Wall Street approved forms of slavery, and the last is simply ludicrous. Bartleby, of course, rejects each of them repeating all the while that he is "not particular." He wants something "definite," something essential, which he cannot find among the walls of Wall Street.

The second lawyer, not as hesitant as the first, has Bartleby taken to the city jail, euphemistically entitled the Halls of Justice and more commonly known as the Tombs. Earlier the lawyer-narrator had likened Wall Street to Petra, which was the ancient capital of Edom and famous for its Hellenistic tombs carved in rock. Thus the lawyer equates Wall Street with the jail: both are tombs. When the lawyer visits Bartleby in his tomb, the scrivener says, "I know you . . . and I want nothing to say to you" (p. 61). The lawyer pleads that "It was not I that brought you here" (p. 61) and adds, rather pathetically, "see, it is not so sad a place as one might think. Look, there is the sky, and here is the grass" (p. 62). Bartleby responds by saying only "I know where I am" (p. 62).

The lawyer's conversation with the grub man provides an interesting interlude. The grub man, suspecting the lawyer's "friend" to be a "gentleman forger," asks the lawyer whether he was ever acquainted with Monroe Edwards, a distinguished forger and confidence man. To which the lawyer replies, "No, I was never socially acquainted with any forgers" (p. 63). His words are ironic, according to Dillingham in Melville's Short Fiction, because they convey to the reader far more truth than he intends. The lawyer is a forger of sorts, a self-deceiver: "He is not even 'acquainted'--socially or intimately--with what he himself really is."⁹

On his second visit to the Tombs, the lawyer discovers Bartleby dead, curled in a fetal position at the foot of a high wall. In this, the final scene, he alludes to Egypt and the pyramids: "The surrounding walls, of amazing thickness, kept off all sounds behind them. The Egyptian character of the masonry weighed upon me with its gloom. But a soft imprisoned turf grew under foot. The heart of the eternal pyramids . . ." (pp. 63-64). By equating the Tombs (i.e., Wall Street) with ancient Egypt, he by extension equates Bartleby's plight with the plight of the oppressed masses, the slaves of ancient Egypt. After all, the pyramids were built with slave labor, just as Wall Street was built by the labor of multitudes of Bartlebys, who are no less slaves than their distant counterparts. And to extend the metaphor further, the lawyers and other property owners are the new pharaohs: the walls of Wall Street were built in their name, and to serve them. Bartleby, by virtue of his imprisonment within the pyramids, sleeps with "kings and counsellors" (p. 64).

Contrary to what many critics believe, the epilogue concerning the Dead Letter Office provides an appropriate and thematically important conclusion to the narrative.¹⁰ ln this short, after-the-fact account the lawyer passes along "one little item of rumour" (p. 64)--the rumor that Bartleby had worked in the Dead Letter Office in Washington, until suddenly removed by a change of administration. This information allows the lawyer a convenient explanation of the scrivener's "incurable disorder": doomed by "nature and misfortune" (p. 65) and "prone to a pallid hopelessness'' (p. 65), Bartleby's disorder was brought about by his work sorting dead letters for the flames. Thus the lawyer, by attributing Bartleby's fate to "nature and misfortune," once again denies his responsibility for what has happened to the scrivener.

Furthermore, the Dead Letter Office material is important in another respect. Much as the allusion to ancient Egypt historicizes Bartleby's plight, the epilogue grounds his alienation in a particular class structure. That is to say, there are masses of Bartlebys in nineteenth-century America: his is a story of Wall Street, only one among many. All those who nor eat nor hunger any more, all those who died "despairing" and "unhoping" and "stifled by unrelieved calamities" are personifications of dead letters. Thus the description of the Dead Letter Office becomes the description of the cesspool of alienated humanity:

For by the cartload they are annually burned. Sometimes from out the folded paper the pale clerk takes a ring--the finger it was meant for perhaps, moulders in the grave; a bank-note sent in swiftest charity--he whom it would relieve, nor eats nor hungers any more: pardon for those who died despairing; hope for those who died unhoping; good tidings for those who died stifled by unrelieved calamities. On errands of life, these letters speed to death. (p. 66)

Appropriately enough, the lawyer's narrative comes to an end in the Tombs and the Dead Letter Office. The lawyer concludes his argument to the reader with the epitaph: "Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity!" (p. 65). His words are ironic in that he cannot respond to Bartleby as a living human being, but only as an abstraction--an abstract concept of humanity. In effect, he has rationalized Bartleby's humanity out of existence in his attempt to "mason up his [the scrivener's] remains in the wall." Indeed, the obfuscations, the walling up of Bartleby's remains in the walls of Wall Street could stand as a metaphor for the entire story.

What has been overlooked by the critics for too long is the fact that Melville, by his use of an ironic, self-justifying narrator in "Bartleby," succeeded in writing one of the bitterest indictments of American capitalism ever published.

1. See Leon Howard, Herman Melville: A Biography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951), esp. p. 219. Also Leo Marx, "Melville's Parable of the Walls," Sewanee Review, 61 (1953), 602-27, and Mario D'Avanzo, "Melville's 'Bartleby' and John Jacob Astor," New England Quarterly, 41 (1968), 259-64.

2. Newton Arvin, Herman Melville (New York: William Sloane Associates, 1950), p. 243, and Richard Chase, Herman Melville: A Critical Study (New York: The Macmillan Company,1949), p. 143, argue that Bartleby suffers from schizophrenia. Nathalia Wright reads "Bartleby" as Melville's illustration of Burton's melancholy man in 'Melville and Burton,' with 'Bartleby' as an Anatomy of Melancholy," Tennessee Studies in Literature, 15 (1970), 1-13. Robert Donald Spector, "Melville's 'Bartleby' and the Absurd," Nineteenth Century Fiction, 16 (1961), 175-77, and Maurice Friedman, "Bartleby and the Modern Exile," in Melville Annual 1965, A Symposium: Bartleby the Scrivener, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1966), pp. 64-81, present "Bartleby" as Melville's parable of the absurd. Several critics see Bartleby as Christ or Christlike. See especially: H. Bruce Franklin, The Wake of the Gods: Melville's Mythology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1963), pp. 126-33, 151, and William Bysshe Stein, "Bartleby: The Christian Conscience," in Vincent, pp. 104-12. Mordecai Marcus finds that Bartleby is the lawyer's psychological double in "Melville's Bartleby as a Psychological Double," College English, 23 (1962), 365-68. Louise K. Barnett gives "Bartleby" a Marxist reading and views Bartleby as "victim of and protest against the numbing world of capitalistic profit and alienated labor" in "Bartleby as Alienated Worker," Studies in Short Fiction, 11 (1974), 379-85. The complete bibliography is virtually endless.

3. Herman Melville, The Piazza Tales, The Works of Herman Melville. Standard Edition, X (London: Constable and Company Ltd, 1923), 19. All subsequent references to "Bartleby" will be to this edition. Page numbers will be given parenthetically in the text.

4. R. Bruce Bickley, Jr., The Method of Melville's Short Fiction (Durham: Duke University Press, 1975), p. 36.

5. Stein, p. 104.

6. Interpretations of what Bartleby represents to the lawyer, and interpretations of why the lawyer finds it necessary to justify his behavior toward Bartleby, have varied. H. Bruce Franklin in his chapter on "Bartleby" in The Wake of the Gods finds "Bartleby" to be an allegory of man's responsibility to man, according to the doctrine of Christian charity as put forth in Matthew 25. In this scripture Christ explains that the "least" of men (especially when they appear as strangers) are representatives of Christ and should be treated accordingly. According to this reading, the lawyer must somehow rationalize his behavior because he has failed in his responsibility to Bartleby Christ. On the other hand, Kingsley Widmer in "Melville's Radical Resistance: The Method and Meaning of Bartleby," Studies in the Novel, 1 (1969), 448, presents Bartleby as "the specter of rebellious and irrational human will, whose very existence he [the lawyer] denies." Because the lawyer is a "blandly benevolent rationalist," a "representative liberal American," he cannot admit to the dark truth that Bartleby embodies. Thus he denies by rationalizing, by presenting Bartleby as totally inexplicable.

7. The lawyer misses the irony here, for in ironic contrast to his "snug business among rich men's bonds and mortgages," the bust of Cicero sits behind his desk, a symbol of the virtuous and selfless rule of law.

8. William B. Dillingham, Melville's Short Fiction, 1853-1856 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977), p. 30.

9. Dillingham, p. 45

10. Hershel Parker has shown that newspaper items describing the Dead Letter Office in Washington were common during the year before Putnam's Monthly serialized "Bartleby" in November and December 1853. See Hershel Parker, "Dead Letters and Melville's Bartleby," Resources for American Literary Study, 4 (1974), 90-99.

James C. Wilson, now living in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has published both criticism and fiction in many magazines.

*Arizona Quarterly 37 (Winter 1981), 335-46. Reprinted by permission.

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