In the 19th century, according to Hawthorne and Melville, a man's home was no longer his castle, but a dilapidated parlor, a place of habitation stripped and castrated. a masculinity which hindered the development of a classic and original intellectual literature in favor of the vapid and the uniform. While Hawthorne and Melville's story "Bachelor's Paradise" both show domestic residences under attack by sentimentalist female influence, the respective atmospheres emerge from a different set of authorial concerns. Hawthorne's anxiety comes from a defensive perspective. He causally considers the feminization of the home as a symbolic castration of masculine authority and a negation of the strong ethics of writing (assuming that we consider the work of writing as an "ethic", since it was, and is always a leisure activity in contradiction with traditional work). Melville, while addressing in "The Bachelor's Paradise" some of Hawthorne's emphasis on the origins of this problem, finds the effects of sentimentality more compelling in "The Handmaid's Tartarus." A more subtle version of Hawthorne's castration, writing becomes a mechanical mode of reproduction, a repetitive imprint of mass-produced emotion. From Melville's sterility to Hawthorne's impotence, there is only one step, but an irreversible one, in that Hawthorne is able to prescribe an anti-domestic Viagra, while the spread in Melville's story only occurs metaphorically in the production and distribution of paper (the very problem of starting with it), and not in a reseeding of sterile pages. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay. Hawthorne opens by describing the foundations of House Pyncheon, historical and physical. To defy the curse of witchcraft - a female association, despite Matthew Maule's position behind it - which hangs over the house, Colonel Pyncheon arms himself with masculine traits and actions which will later return in the form of images of more and more sexualized: "Endowed with common sense, as massive and hard as blocks of granite, held together by severe rigidity, as with iron pincers, he followed his original project, probably without even imagining an objection to this subject” (4). Hawthorne contrasts this iron structure with the literary world. Consider Pyncheon's portrait: "...holding a Bible in one hand and with the other raising an iron sword hilt. The latter object, depicted more successfully by the artist, stood out with great greater importance than the sacred volume" (23). Since Pyncheon was given a second screen at the artist's hand (or a third, if one includes Hawthorne's role), the choice to emphasize the sword may result from the painter's own notions of masculinity , and not those of Pyncheon. Either way, the sword may be mightier than the pen, but, so far, not at the pen's expense. Melville, however, finds the pen wanting and echoes Hawthorne's imagery of solid, flabby masculinity: “But the iron heel is replaced by a patent leather boot; the long two-handed sword with a one-handed feather” (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 great sigh,” over an even more effeminate audience whose sex becomes indeterminate by their ornaments: “It rustled the ladies' silk garments and tossed the long curls of the gentlemen's wigs. » (8). We see the precipice from which Pyncheon isfall. Sitting under his portrait brandishing a sword (the reader does not yet know the subject), he is interrupted by death at the moment of writing, frozen “with a quill in his hand” and with “[L]etres, parchments and blank sheets of paper" in front of him (8-9). The blank sheets take on importance with Melville, but for now the central image is that of an oppressive domesticity usurping that of Pyncheon. formerly patriarchal authority just as Pyncheon is prevented from writing and therefore muted, so too must Hawthorne placate the sensitized reader with a playful but pointed critique of political correctness: “Miss Hepzibah Pyncheon...started what he would mock. to qualify the adornment of one's person. Far from us be the impropriety of witnessing, even in imagination, the toilet of a lady! (21) The double use of the words "dress", "parure" and "indecorum"! (like "inappropriate", a sartorial pun, but also extracting the Latin roots of "decor-us") reminds us that Hawthorne is prevented from "attacking" the feminine act of dressing by the feminization of literature - and recalls another obsolete and conscious meaning of "decorum": that which is proper "especially in dramatic, literary or artistic composition" (OED, 1a). If the writer is incapable of telling his art without euphemism, what chance do the characters he has created have? Melville also indirectly comments on this point. During the epicurean feast, the narrator four times interrupts his ridiculous description of the food ("its pleasant flavor dispelled my initial confusion of its main ingredient") with parenthetical justifications for the bachelors' drinking: "(In as a ceremony, simply, just to preserve the good old fashion, we each here drank a glass of good old port)" (206-207). The parentheses may produce an increasing comic effect, but the underlying moral evasions from the narrator force the reader to question his giggling response But Hawthorne's narrator can back down, as Hepzibah contributes most to the castration of the "Time-struck Virgin" she both manifests. a fear of the phallus and a curiosity about sex (24) The chairs in the colonel's room continue the motif of sexualized and rigid objects inherited from his time, and their description shows how Hepzibah might have viewed them: "Half a dozen." There were chairs in the room, straight and stiff, and so ingeniously designed for the colonel. discomfort of the human person that they were embarrassing even in sight" (23). Hepzibah reacts to her phallic fear by appropriating the male role in sex and reversing the fact that she participated little in "sexual intercourse and to the pleasures” of life (21) Its interaction with the interiority of the house is replete with other sexual puns that call for Freudian interpretation: First, each drawer of the large old-fashioned desk must be opened, with difficulty, and with a succession of spasmodic jerks; then everything will have to close again, with the same agitated reluctance. There is a rustling of stiff silks across the room... We heard the trick; of a key in a small lock... (21-22) The sexual act recreated through her domestic and dominant machinations, Hepzibah's efforts end in finding the precious image of an effeminate man whose features sensual “seems to indicate less a capacity for thought than a gentle and voluptuous emotion” (22). She clearly prefers an absence of intellectuality to an abundance of sentimentality, but how does Hepzibah castrate the male presence within the house? Setting up a boutique appears to be the ultimate downfall for Pyncheon's once-proud house, and weWe can trace Hepzibah's sexual anxieties. as a virgin woman in the course of her duties as a trader. She experiences an unwanted orgasmic reaction to the entrance of a client through the door, equipped with a bell: This little bell... was designed in such a way as to vibrate by means of a steel spring and thus to warn the interior regions of the house when any guest should cross the threshold. Her ugly, wicked little racket (heard now for the first time, perhaps, since Hepzibah's wigged predecessor had retired from the trade) immediately set every nerve in her body into a reactive, tumultuous vibration. (30) Beyond the many allusions to virginity and the vagina, it is also important to note that the first client is a man – and Holgrave, incidentally, is the complete opposite of her beloved young man in the portrait. As the owner of the virago, we see Hepzibah transformed into the witch from Hansel and Gretel. First, Hawthorne repeatedly emphasizes her 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; "his intellect stiff and dark," Hepzibah's grasp of the masculine mind through the "stiff" motif, is perplexed as to "how to attract little boys to his premises" (26). The details match almost perfectly, with Hepzibah and the witch of the gingerbread house trapping the children with the same food, but with Hepzibah's treat meeting an inevitable and self-imposed demise: she now places a gingerbread elephant spice against the window, but with such a trembling air. feel that it falls to the ground, with the dismemberment of three legs and its trunk; it's no longer an elephant, it's become a few pieces of moldy gingerbread. (26) The elephant loses its elephantine essence through Hepzibah's "trembling" dismembering touch, an action I consider as unconsciously intentional as a literal Freudian slip. She did the same with the house, dismembering his masculinity through her own sexual anxiety and stemming all literary irrigation through her patriarchal arrogance. Melville takes these truths for granted and moves on to a finer exploration of the ramifications of female authority. in the second half of his diptych with “The Tartare of the Servants”. The treatment of the white of the blank page recalls Paul Valry's explanation for why he could not write novels: "I could never start looking at a blank sheet of paper and start writing." The Duchess went out at five o'clock ". We can now consider this example in light of the bastardization of the Hemingway-influenced journalistic style in the 20th century, but the anxiety of defacing pure white paper, glowing with poetic potential, with factual and novelistic writing was not not the primary concern in Melville's day. More destructive was the mechanical, iterative sentimentality that filled these blank pages. Melville foreshadows and draws attention to this treatment of emptiness in a paragraph recounting the narrator's seemingly mundane movements. covering my horse and piling my buffalo on top of the blanket and tucking its edges well around the chest and breeches, so that the wind could not expose it, I tied it securely and ran lamely towards the factory gate, stiffened by frost and burdened with the dreaded nothingness of my driver. . (215) The six alliterative words beginning with "b" (and two different parts of speech derived from "blank") anticipate the six occurrences of "blank" two paragraphs later for the workers, but also presage the workers' own gradual progression. narrator verseverbal emptiness and sterility. He, too, is stripped of his ability to create new configurations of language in the stifling, unpoetic assonance of the passage - it is he, after all, who runs "lame", who is only "stiff" because from the cold, and ends up being “crowded”. 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 does not say." Likewise, the emptiness here – and the fact that “[T]he human voice has been banished from the place” – highlights the lack of male presence and diminishing authority. Masculinity survives only in the form of the predatory sexual imagery of "heavy iron, with a vertical thing like a piston going up and down periodically on a heavy block of wood", but the imprint is that of a crown 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 "in circles" in the vats, and the factory owner refuses to hire married women because "they tend to be too intermittent" (218, 222). The stress on regularity and cyclicity finds its fruit in the catamenic imagery of mechanical reproduction. The waterwheel of initiation ("This sets our whole machine in motion") is itself set in motion by the "turbid waters of the Bloody River", and the papermaking room is "stuffy with a strange blood. abdominal heat” (216, 218). But menstrual associations maintain a climate of sterile creation: menstruation is the paradoxical sign of a fertile body which has, at least for the previous month, resisted fertilization. This is why the confused narrator finds it “strange that the red waters turn into pale tissue paper, I mean”” (217). Any doubt that Melville draws an explicit parallel between papermaking and pregnancy is banished when Cupid reveals that the process from gestation to ejection out of the metaphorical vaginal canal takes not nine months, but a few minutes , and ends with the umbilical cord releasing a “scissor sound... of a broken cord” (220). John Locke's comparison between "the human mind at birth on a blank sheet of paper" and "something intended to be scribbled" reinforces this idea, but Melville problematizes transference by showing that in fact, little passes from the parent to the child under the influence of the child. these sterile auspices (221). The narrator marks a test sheet, not with his name, since, apparently, he has none, nor any identity to speak of, but with that of Cupid - and who, nine minutes later, returns with "my 'Cupid' half erased. of it” (220). The ownership is doubtful; the narrator claims to own the paper, although Cupid's name is (barely) printed on it. As with the Pyncheon rug, "originally rich in texture, but so worn and discolored in recent years that its once brilliant silhouette had faded into an indistinguishable hue" (Hawthorne often uses "texture" as a meaning something written), identity is erased (Hawthorne 23). The resulting dilution and confusion of literary identity renders the machine the only certain "writer," an author whose mechanical reproduction eliminates human contact and progressive authority in favor of cloying typing and blocked intellect. Keep in mind: this is just a sample. .Get a personalized essay now from our expert writers.Get a personalized essayThe narrator's only recourse is to leave the factory, and there the story.