The Destructive Nature of Industrialization Depicted in Herman Melville's The Paradise of Bachelors and The Tartarus of Maids

In Part V of Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, through the following quote, "To owe life to a criminal...to betray society in order to remain true...these absurdities should come about and be heaped on top of him...it was this that defeated him," explains how Javert’s subjugation to his internal conflict imploded and eventually influenced his suicide (Hugo 1181). History has shown that a person’s or group’s decision to take action with their given situation will inevitably have an effect on their state of conflict. Events such as the American and French Revolutions evidence this statement. Similarly, a person's state of conflict will also inevitably form them into whatever the situation yields. A well-known American

Society often fail to understand and see the mental pain that individuals carry throughout their lives. Some people bear its burden, while others suffer greatly because of it, to the point of choosing self-destruction. The narrators from “The Gargoyle” (Davidson) and “Walk to Morning” (Boyden) both experience this pain that ultimately sets them on a course to a deep pit. They survive their near-deaths and later encounter unique life-changing people. As a result, they become better individuals.

The concept of balance is central to Herman Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” The first story of the diptych reflects the opulent and extravagant feasting of a group of lawyers in London, while the second depicts the laborious, cold, and bland life of workers at a paper mill. These polar opposites perfectly illustrate this idea of a worldly equilibrium would have resounded well with Melville’s Romantic, educated, and upper class readership. Though there is much to be learned through this historical context, viewing the juxtaposition of success and struggle through a modern lens yields another perspective that Melville could never have foretold.

Back in the day almost everyone viewed woman to be the person who cleans, cooks, has children, and obeys her husband. Even woman themselves had this view hammered into their minds at such a young age, the views that women are inferior to men. This stigma of woman can be found traced throughout Virginia Woolf’s essay of two meals, a meal for men and a meal for women at a college. She uses numerous composition techniques and effectively disperses them throughout her narrative. By doing so, she accurately demonstrates her views on society’s stigma of a woman's role in an eloquent manner.

Beginning with Rebecca Harding Davis’s Life in the Iron-Mills, readers can find within the text a clear oppression of lower class peoples that is also an indirect oppression of women as lower-class individuals. Davis tells this story with a man named Hugh Wolfe as her main

According to Elizabeth Lowell, “Some of us aren't meant to belong. Some of us have to turn the world upside down and shake the hell out of it until we make our own place in it.” Sometimes what every situation needs is an outsider to flip the script and create a new outlook on everything. In Shirley Jackson’s novel, “We Have Always Lived in the Castle,” the speaker, Merricat, is an outsider of society on many levels, such as mental health, gender, and that she is an upper class citizen in a poor area. Although Merricat is mentally unstable, her outsider’s perspective criticizes the social standard for women in the 1960s, indicating that social roles, marriage, and the patriarchy are not necessary aspects in life such as it is not necessary to have the same outlook on life as others.

Despite the economic distinction and living conditions that separated the bachelors and the maids, they both have similarities. Though there are similarities, they only further expose the power of the upper class over the working class. These similarities bring to our attention the topic repeatedly discussed in class, which is the power of choosing. Both the bachelors and the maids lived or were isolated from the world and had no attachments to family. Melville explains, “…these easy hearted men had no wives or children to give an anxious thought” (6). The bachelors chose to not have a family so that it did not interrupt their tranquility and so that they did not have to worry

Therefore, the Marxist base-superstructure model must be consulted, and the capitalist ideology behind The Bachelor explained. Karl Marx’s theory basically states that the base determines the superstructure’s content. Upon relating that idea to mass media or more specifically TV as the superstructure, the base can be defined as capitalist corporations consisting of writers, producers, editors and directors who all support capitalist ideology. As a result, the American audience sees what capitalists believe should be America’s dominant ideology. The primary message that The Bachelor sends is that money can bring a lasting happiness and a loving marriage. There are also the inferred ideas that people should value a person’s youth and attractiveness above personality and intellect, and that a meaningful relationship can be formed into a marriage proposal in just a few months. For many skeptical and educated viewers, it is hard to see the reality or truths in these shows. So this is when

Each person experiences loss and the pain and grief that coincides with it at some point in their life. Often times, these people gain a new outlook on life, and begin to see the world differently. People change as a result of pain; they think and act differently. Margaret Atwood utilizes characterization through Verna’s presentation, thoughts, and actions in “Stone Mattress” to show that pain changes people.

Life in the Iron Mills is a novella that is hard to classify as a specific genre. The genre that fits the most into this novella is realism, because of the separation of classes, the hard work that a person has to put into their every day life to try and make a difference, and the way society influences the actions of people and their relationships. However, no matter what genre is specifically chosen, there will be other genres present that contradict the genre of choice. While the novella shows romanticism, naturalism, and realism, this essay is specifically centered around realism. The ultimate theme in Rebecca Davis’ Life in the Iron Mills is the separation of classes and gender. It is the separation of classes when the people in the

TS Eliot’s poems, ‘’Preludes’’ and ‘’The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’, present the idea of isolation as a direct result of their character's struggles that they have experienced in their lives. In ‘’Preludes’’, the author creates many unpleasant images to reveal that everybody, rich or poor, can be afflicted by loneliness. The poor, who are only able to ‘’[curl] the papers from from [their] hair], have to suffer every day and find ways just to get by in their lives, revealing the horrendous effects of poverty in people’s lives and the difficulty of battling it alone. On the other hand, the working class also experience loneliness but in a different context. The ‘’muddy feet that press to early coffee stands’’ are the feet of the working

In England during the industrial revolution there was a lot of poverty and pollution, especially in the main towns where the mass unemployment and people often had to go into the work houses. The conditions that they were made to work in were overcrowded. There was no sanitation or anywhere to clean, and there was a large amount of pollution. These all led to diseases among the workers. Some of the jobs that the children were made to do were chimney sweeping or selling matches. Adults had to do bone crushing for fertilisers, working in kitchens and doing the laundry for rich people.

In Katherine Mansfield’s short story “The Garden Party”, Laura’s wavering view on the class distinctions of the time can be seen through the recurring symbol of the sandwiches that are presented throughout the story. The symbolism of the sandwiches can be seen in the two juxtaposing symbols- the delicacy of the sandwiches, symbolizing the upper class, and the bread-and-butter, symbolizing the lower class. Both of these contradictory symbols work together to form the image of Laura’s wavering opinion on the class distinctions that are imposed in the generation of the play.

In order to create his ideas, Bacon elicits critical diction to serve as the basis for the entire essay. Continually he criticizes single, laymen for viewing marriage and having a family as an end to their livelihood. That children are the “abatement to his riches,” and lack of femininity within a man’s life causes the development of negative attributes such as being “cruel and coldhearted.” Furthermore, that without marriage single men are “facile and corrupt” due to the negative characteristics associated with no marriage. Moreover, Bacon repeatedly creates analogies to criticize the behaviors and views of single men. That they think that “girdles to garters to be bonds and shackles” depicting their view that marriage is an end to freedom. In addition, he claims that single men are more likely to donate since “charity will hardly water the ground where it must first fill a pool.” That married men would are more likely to hold on to their money due to them needing to provide for their family and having developed the trait of frugality. Bacon ingrained the rhetorical strategies of critical diction and analogy to depict the negative outcomes that men will face with a lack of

Each writer addresses the status of Women to society in their work to show how women were suppressed from intellectual equality and freedom during their time. As the intro stated there were men and women of high regard in the fight to open society’s eyes to women inequality. One of these men was J.S. Mill, an English or Victorian philosopher, thinker, and social activist. Who through one of his