Herman Melville's Use Of 'Dehumanization In Bartleby'

Herman Melville was seen as a very inspirational, yet controversial writer in the mid-nineteenth century. In many of his writings, he is concerned with the ultimate realities that seem to underline appearances, such as in his short story “Bartleby” (Melville v). In this piece, Melville clearly reveals the depiction of the accentuating theme of dehumanization and victimization within the workplace. The audience can discover this throughout his short story by simply examining the setting, imagery and the characters as powerful allegorical roles. With the use of his structure and these literal elements, Melville evidently portrays the theme of dehumanization and victimization in the workplace. Melville uses his literal element of setting to

The narrator and Bartleby’s office is “…an unobstructed view of a lofty brick wall, black by age and everlasting shade, which wall required no spyglass to bring out its lurking beauties…” (Melville 4). However, Bartleby was placed in the corner of this office room, up against a small side window which gave him little to no view at all. There was also a folding screen that “…entirely isolate[d] Bartleby… And thus, in a manner, privacy and society were conjoined” (Melville 9).We can see Bartleby being isolated from his surroundings. This gives us a hint of this victimization in the workplace which leads to Bartleby’s self-isolation. However, Melville constructs an even deeper meaning into this setting when describing the outskirts of Wall Street. His descriptions of this landscape are completely unnatural, where one is cut off from nature and almost all living things. Even at night, this isolation includes the absence of people in the streets and the work

At the end of this story Bartleby winds up in prison in what is called the Halls of Justice, or typically known as “The Tombs.” This “…Egyptian character of the masonry…” is described in a manner through that of death imagery (“Bartleby the Scrivener”). Melville illustrates “the heart of eternal pyramids” as a way of clearly looking at this place of captivity as tombs or death itself (Melville 33). Death is seen as the only constant within this setting and Melville goes on to illustrate this within the image of the birds dropping seeds that grow in this hostile environment. We can see that this grass represents a trapped life to Bartleby, with no hope of escaping this sort of Egyptian character of the Tombs. Melville portrays the prison as Bartleby’s death. He illustrates it in a way for the audience to see that Bartleby chooses his death, detaching himself from life in stages to his inevitable end due to the victimization and dehumanization he has experienced within the modern economy. The real death is diffuse and a sort of spiritual gloom infiltrating the emptiness in the landscape of Wall Street, the daunting stonework of the prison and the Dead Letter Office where Bartleby supposedly used to work. We see Melville depicting this victimization within the workplace, that living is not the opposite of death, but rather a condition continually assaulted