What do you think?
Rate this book
The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids (Annotated Edition)
“The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids” is a short story by American writer Herman Melville (1819-1891). It was first published in 1855.
This edition also contains a biographic profile of Melville and a complete bibliography of his novels and short stories.
This edition also contains a biographic profile of Melville and a complete bibliography of his novels and short stories.
46 pages, Kindle Edition
Published January 8, 2013
About the author
Herman Melville
3,240 books4,926 followersThere is more than one author with this name
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
Herman Melville was an American novelist, short story writer, and poet of the American Renaissance period. Among his best-known works are Moby-Dick (1851); Typee (1846), a romanticized account of his experiences in Polynesia; and Billy Budd, Sailor, a posthumously published novella. At the time of his death, Melville was no longer well known to the public, but the 1919 centennial of his birth was the starting point of a Melville revival. Moby-Dick eventually would be considered one of the great American novels.
Melville was born in New York City, the third child of a prosperous merchant whose death in 1832 left the family in dire financial straits. He took to sea in 1839 as a common sailor on a merchant ship and then on the whaler Acushnet, but he jumped ship in the Marquesas Islands. Typee, his first book, and its sequel, Omoo (1847), were travel-adventures based on his encounters with the peoples of the islands. Their success gave him the financial security to marry Elizabeth Shaw, the daughter of the Boston jurist Lemuel Shaw. Mardi (1849), a romance-adventure and his first book not based on his own experience, was not well received. Redburn (1849) and White-Jacket (1850), both tales based on his experience as a well-born young man at sea, were given respectable reviews, but did not sell well enough to support his expanding family.
Melville's growing literary ambition showed in Moby-Dick (1851), which took nearly a year and a half to write, but it did not find an audience, and critics scorned his psychological novel Pierre: or, The Ambiguities (1852). From 1853 to 1856, Melville published short fiction in magazines, including "Benito Cereno" and "Bartleby, the Scrivener". In 1857, he traveled to England, toured the Near East, and published his last work of prose, The Confidence-Man (1857). He moved to New York in 1863, eventually taking a position as a United States customs inspector.
From that point, Melville focused his creative powers on poetry. Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War (1866) was his poetic reflection on the moral questions of the American Civil War. In 1867, his eldest child Malcolm died at home from a self-inflicted gunshot. Melville's metaphysical epic Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in the Holy Land was published in 1876. In 1886, his other son Stanwix died of apparent tuberculosis, and Melville retired. During his last years, he privately published two volumes of poetry, and left one volume unpublished. The novella Billy Budd was left unfinished at his death, but was published posthumously in 1924. Melville died from cardiovascular disease in 1891.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
December 14, 2016
After re-reading
Moby-Dick
, I decided to revisit this remarkable short story (or diptych of sketches) as well. I do not usually review single short stories on Goodreads—it feels like cheating to add something less than a whole book—but this one deserves it. Originally published in Harper's in 1855, it is one of Melville's lesser-known works, not included in his 1856 collection The Piazza Tales, though today you can find it in the Norton Anthology of American Literature, where I read it. An intricate juxtaposition of two extremes—the wealth and leisure of unmarried men (paradise), the poverty and labor of unmarried women (tartarus, or hell)—the story seems to be an attack on social inequality in its economic and sexual manifestations, but a careful reading suggests that it is something more and less radical than that.
In the first sketch, we are treated to an elaborate description of a cloistral neighborhood in the heart of the City of London (near the Temple Bar and the Inns of Court) mainly inhabited by lawyers and other gentlemen of elite profession (literary men, scholars), all of them unmarried, this in contrast to the harried journalists of nearby Fleet Street, called "Benedicks"—i.e., henpecked husbands—by the narrator. These bachelors, the narrator explains in a tone of ironic exuberance, are the modern-day equivalent of the Knights Templar:
Most of the remainder of the first sketch is taken up by a dinner the narrator shared with nine of these bachelors. The elaborate meal is described in the mock-epic terms of an army's advance punctuated by frequent drinking, with different dishes standing in for different military ranks (roast beef is "the English generalissimo"), an analogy of comic incongruity emphasizing the decay of a warrior caste—a "band of brothers," to quote a Shakespeareanism used in the story—into a company of pleasure-loving idea men. Melville's satire is not directed at the worldly goods the men enjoy per se, as if good wine, fine architecture, and scholarship were merely effete preoccupations to be scorned. My point is that Melville's irony is ever-present but gentle, skeptical but not corrosive: there is real pleasure and conviviality to this story—I was reminded of a humanistic English Renaissance poem like Ben Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper"—and it is not a Rousseauist or Tolstoyan attack on civilization as an incorrigible stew of hypocritical corruption.
But when we turn to "The Tartarus of Maids" we find the underside and upholder of civilization, scholarship, and all fine living: women's labor, in every sense. The second sketch, unlike the first, is almost overbearingly allegorical, as the narrator travels through a hallucinatory New England rural landscape near Woedolor Mountain, his elaborated description of which evokes female genitalia and whose rustic landmarks sound like dirty and misogynistic euphemisms for the same ("Mad Maid Bellows'-pipe," "Black Notch," "Devil's Dungeon," "Blood River"). Resembling a "feudal, Rhineland and Thurmberg" scene, this is an American Gothic setting; in Melville's compelling political paradox, calling the whole American experiment into doubt, the urban bachelors of Old England have escaped medieval times and converted its trappings to more modern conveniences, while the rustics of New England still inhabit the Middle Ages.
The narrator soon arrives at a paper mill where pale women are worked incessantly by a frightful male overseer. Granted a tour of the premises by a boy named Cupid, he watches the process by which the paper is made—a process described, not least in having the avatar of erotic love as its conveyance, so as to resemble pregnancy and childbirth (for instance, it takes exactly nine minutes). As he watches the women at the machines, the narrator is horrified by the way humanity's seeming inventions have enslaved us:
As with "The Paradise of Bachelors," we are not reading a simple social critique written by someone who imagines a political solution to the problems he (correctly) observes. The narrator, we learn at the second sketch's beginning, is a "seeds-man" who has come to the paper factory to purchase envelopes in which to mail his seeds. With its genital landscape and allusions to Dante, the story is so inviting of an allegorical interpretation that we should not hesitate to identify this odd occupation with that more common one of the writer, who uses paper to disseminate not his genetic but his memetic seed. The bachelor life of London—to which he is only a visitor—as well as the smallest means of his literary work depend on the exploitation he witnesses in the factory. Even so, this is not a reformist tearjerker by Charles Dickens or Rebecca Harding Davis: the factory and its machinery are also a metaphor for biological fatality, the reproduction of bodies by bodies, the burden of which falls upon women and which is contrasted to the reproduction of ideas indulged in by men of leisure, especially those unencumbered by wives and children. The artificial machinery is modeled on the natural machinery; where does humanity's inhumanity come from if not from (mother) nature or (father) God? In which case, to whom can we appeal but to those deities?
Melville is not only attacking a particular state of socio-political affairs, but, like Captain Ahab, he is arraigning the entire cosmos out of which our socio-political affairs emanate; it is the cosmos that will have to be reformed if life is to be made more equitable, if bachelors and literary men are not to feed on the coerced labor of pallid maids. As I wrote above, this story is both extremely radical and not radical at all, in the sense that it identifies extremes of grim truth underlying everyday life even as it implies that little besides actually altering human biology or nature itself can be done to remediate the hideous injustice of human affairs—from which the narrator (and his author) so scrupulously demonstrate themselves to be the beneficiaries. This story allows its gentle irony to co-exist with its guilty fear, its sensuous pleasures with its soulful despair—life contains all this, Melville says, and its beauties and its monstrosities are inextricably intertwined. The key phrase in the story's final sentence is "inscrutable nature." This is a very unsettling work of literature.
It is easy to damn the heretic, but what, really, can the pious tell us about why the universe is arranged so poorly? And it is easy to scorn the aesthete, but what, really, can the reformer do about the universe?
In the first sketch, we are treated to an elaborate description of a cloistral neighborhood in the heart of the City of London (near the Temple Bar and the Inns of Court) mainly inhabited by lawyers and other gentlemen of elite profession (literary men, scholars), all of them unmarried, this in contrast to the harried journalists of nearby Fleet Street, called "Benedicks"—i.e., henpecked husbands—by the narrator. These bachelors, the narrator explains in a tone of ironic exuberance, are the modern-day equivalent of the Knights Templar:
Like the years before the flood, the bold Knights-Templars are no more. Nevertheless, the name remains, and the nominal society, and the ancient grounds, and some of the ancient edifices. But the iron heel is changed to a boot of patent-leather; the long two-handed sword to a one-handed quill; the monk-giver of gratuitous ghostly counsel now counsels for a fee; the defender of the sarcophagus (if in good practice with his weapon) now has more than one case to defend; the vowed opener and clearer of all highways leading to the Holy Sepulchre, now has it in particular charge to check, to clog, to hinder, and embarrass all the courts and avenues of Law; the knight-combatant of the Saracen, breasting spear- points at Acre, now fights law-points in Westminster Hall. The helmet is a wig. Struck by Time's enchanter's Wand, the Templar is to-day a Lawyer.This story, as you will see, works in a persistent idiom of double entendre, so we should understand the transition from iron to patent-leather footwear and sword to quill to imply a diminution or at least softening in the phallus.
Most of the remainder of the first sketch is taken up by a dinner the narrator shared with nine of these bachelors. The elaborate meal is described in the mock-epic terms of an army's advance punctuated by frequent drinking, with different dishes standing in for different military ranks (roast beef is "the English generalissimo"), an analogy of comic incongruity emphasizing the decay of a warrior caste—a "band of brothers," to quote a Shakespeareanism used in the story—into a company of pleasure-loving idea men. Melville's satire is not directed at the worldly goods the men enjoy per se, as if good wine, fine architecture, and scholarship were merely effete preoccupations to be scorned. My point is that Melville's irony is ever-present but gentle, skeptical but not corrosive: there is real pleasure and conviviality to this story—I was reminded of a humanistic English Renaissance poem like Ben Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper"—and it is not a Rousseauist or Tolstoyan attack on civilization as an incorrigible stew of hypocritical corruption.
But when we turn to "The Tartarus of Maids" we find the underside and upholder of civilization, scholarship, and all fine living: women's labor, in every sense. The second sketch, unlike the first, is almost overbearingly allegorical, as the narrator travels through a hallucinatory New England rural landscape near Woedolor Mountain, his elaborated description of which evokes female genitalia and whose rustic landmarks sound like dirty and misogynistic euphemisms for the same ("Mad Maid Bellows'-pipe," "Black Notch," "Devil's Dungeon," "Blood River"). Resembling a "feudal, Rhineland and Thurmberg" scene, this is an American Gothic setting; in Melville's compelling political paradox, calling the whole American experiment into doubt, the urban bachelors of Old England have escaped medieval times and converted its trappings to more modern conveniences, while the rustics of New England still inhabit the Middle Ages.
The narrator soon arrives at a paper mill where pale women are worked incessantly by a frightful male overseer. Granted a tour of the premises by a boy named Cupid, he watches the process by which the paper is made—a process described, not least in having the avatar of erotic love as its conveyance, so as to resemble pregnancy and childbirth (for instance, it takes exactly nine minutes). As he watches the women at the machines, the narrator is horrified by the way humanity's seeming inventions have enslaved us:
But what made the thing I saw so specially terrible to me was the metallic necessity, the unbudging fatality which governed it. Though, here and there, I could not follow the thin, gauzy vail of pulp in the course of its more mysterious or entirely invisible advance, yet it was indubitable that, at those points where it eluded me, it still marched on in unvarying docility to the autocratic cunning of the machine.The narrator, who also narrated "The Paradise of Bachelors," cannot help but contrast the sumptuous civilization of the barristers and literary men in London with the laboring plight of these unmarried women, horrifically pale (like the whiteness of Melville's whale, their pallor is the "colorless all-color of atheism"—signifying nothing, in short).
As with "The Paradise of Bachelors," we are not reading a simple social critique written by someone who imagines a political solution to the problems he (correctly) observes. The narrator, we learn at the second sketch's beginning, is a "seeds-man" who has come to the paper factory to purchase envelopes in which to mail his seeds. With its genital landscape and allusions to Dante, the story is so inviting of an allegorical interpretation that we should not hesitate to identify this odd occupation with that more common one of the writer, who uses paper to disseminate not his genetic but his memetic seed. The bachelor life of London—to which he is only a visitor—as well as the smallest means of his literary work depend on the exploitation he witnesses in the factory. Even so, this is not a reformist tearjerker by Charles Dickens or Rebecca Harding Davis: the factory and its machinery are also a metaphor for biological fatality, the reproduction of bodies by bodies, the burden of which falls upon women and which is contrasted to the reproduction of ideas indulged in by men of leisure, especially those unencumbered by wives and children. The artificial machinery is modeled on the natural machinery; where does humanity's inhumanity come from if not from (mother) nature or (father) God? In which case, to whom can we appeal but to those deities?
Melville is not only attacking a particular state of socio-political affairs, but, like Captain Ahab, he is arraigning the entire cosmos out of which our socio-political affairs emanate; it is the cosmos that will have to be reformed if life is to be made more equitable, if bachelors and literary men are not to feed on the coerced labor of pallid maids. As I wrote above, this story is both extremely radical and not radical at all, in the sense that it identifies extremes of grim truth underlying everyday life even as it implies that little besides actually altering human biology or nature itself can be done to remediate the hideous injustice of human affairs—from which the narrator (and his author) so scrupulously demonstrate themselves to be the beneficiaries. This story allows its gentle irony to co-exist with its guilty fear, its sensuous pleasures with its soulful despair—life contains all this, Melville says, and its beauties and its monstrosities are inextricably intertwined. The key phrase in the story's final sentence is "inscrutable nature." This is a very unsettling work of literature.
It is easy to damn the heretic, but what, really, can the pious tell us about why the universe is arranged so poorly? And it is easy to scorn the aesthete, but what, really, can the reformer do about the universe?
May 28, 2025
Herman Melville writes stories for the mind that desires an intense workout session. Much of his prose is long-winded and, hats off to him, once he finds a million-dollar word, he uses it often, so you get that repetition vocabulary learning.
As for the story (I've only read The Tartarus of Maids), it was a bit strange to me that it's categorized as "classic fantasy" when it primarily introduces the reader to factory working in the late 1800s. The journey to the paper factory and the names of the locations (i.e. Devil's Dungeon) were the only indications that this story is fantasy, aside from the mystic nature of the girls working the factory.
Overall, it seemed mostly a depressing story and while I usually enjoy a good vocabulary workout, this prose was very difficult for me to enjoy reading. Did I understand it? Yes; but were all of those words necessary for the story? Well, it wouldn't be a Melville book if that answer was "no". Highly recommend if you'd like to challenge your literacy skills.
As for the story (I've only read The Tartarus of Maids), it was a bit strange to me that it's categorized as "classic fantasy" when it primarily introduces the reader to factory working in the late 1800s. The journey to the paper factory and the names of the locations (i.e. Devil's Dungeon) were the only indications that this story is fantasy, aside from the mystic nature of the girls working the factory.
Overall, it seemed mostly a depressing story and while I usually enjoy a good vocabulary workout, this prose was very difficult for me to enjoy reading. Did I understand it? Yes; but were all of those words necessary for the story? Well, it wouldn't be a Melville book if that answer was "no". Highly recommend if you'd like to challenge your literacy skills.
February 24, 2020
Found in a collection with only the second part, The Tartarus of Maids.
I liked it well enough, but when I discovered it was only half of a bigger tale, my interest waned and it sunk in my view.
Maybe some day I'll read it as a whole and change my mind, who knows?
I liked it well enough, but when I discovered it was only half of a bigger tale, my interest waned and it sunk in my view.
Maybe some day I'll read it as a whole and change my mind, who knows?
April 2, 2025
Started with Tartarus, which was a mistake because it is far superior. I would recommending reading both back-to-back if possible, because they work rather well together. Clashing perspectives of Melville's society, with the rich dandies who can occupy their time with any frivolity life may offer, except true and actual work, contrasting with the dehumanizing nature of industrial labor that sucks out the soul of those poor wretches whose crime was to be born not rich enough. Paradise should be read to heighten the effect of Tartarus, a 1st hand account of a paper factory and its female work force. A strong reminder why Labor Unions are necessary.
Paradise of Bachelors
6/10
Tartarus of Maids
8/10
Together
7.5/10
Paradise of Bachelors
6/10
Tartarus of Maids
8/10
Together
7.5/10
April 17, 2020
This was extremely difficult to read! Especially when Melville was describing things: he used tons of words I've never heard before. Fortunately, I had a facing-page translation helping me with the difficult passages.
The first part, The Paradise of Bachelors is fricking boring. I didn't care about what Melville was telling me because... I don't know, their world seemed so far away from me.
The second part, The Tartarus of Maids was a tad more interesting. I like the description of how a paper-mill works and its impact on women.
Note to my bilingual edition:
Although the text is so difficult, the curator points out the right pronunciation of know, hours, farms, fastened, and half. But... if one can actually read and understand this prose, they sure know how to pronounce such basic words.
The first part, The Paradise of Bachelors is fricking boring. I didn't care about what Melville was telling me because... I don't know, their world seemed so far away from me.
The second part, The Tartarus of Maids was a tad more interesting. I like the description of how a paper-mill works and its impact on women.
Note to my bilingual edition:
Although the text is so difficult, the curator points out the right pronunciation of know, hours, farms, fastened, and half. But... if one can actually read and understand this prose, they sure know how to pronounce such basic words.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews