While the Transcendentalists often wrote of our American identity with a very optimistic tone, Melville wrote with the purpose of giving readers more of a reality check.\u00a0 In Bartleby the Scrivener<\/em>, Melville targets our nation\u2019s capitalistic system and authority.\u00a0 He does this by presenting readers with the interesting character of Bartleby, a disobedient scrivener on Wall Street.\u00a0 Whenever Bartleby\u2019s boss asks him to do something, he simply responds with, \u201cI would prefer not to,\u201d showing no sense of concern to potentially being fired from his job (1490).\u00a0 This defiance displays a common theme in Dark Romantic writing of the shunning of civilization.\u00a0 It is considered the \u2018norm\u2019 in our society for an employee to respect the authority of his or her boss.\u00a0 By breaking this norm, Bartleby is breaking away from society in a sense, something Herman Melville was very passionate about as a Dark Romantic writer.<\/p>\n At the same time, Bartleby\u2019s defiance shocks the narrator of Bartleby the Scrivener<\/em>.\u00a0 He cannot comprehend how someone could have no regard to the possible consequences to his or her disobedient actions in the workplace, and he does not really know how to address the issue.\u00a0 As readers, we see the narrator weigh out the options in his head as to how he should proceed.\u00a0 Eventually, he decides to take pity on Bartleby viewing him as a lesser person.\u00a0 In this case, the narrator views himself as a philanthropist.\u00a0 Melville was skeptical of what motivated charity and philanthropy in a person, and he shows firsthand how it can lead to disaster as it did so at the ending of Bartleby the Scrivener<\/em>.<\/p>\n Setting in Melville\u2019s works plays an important part in the development of the plot, and the importance of setting is particularly noticeable in Bartleby the Scrivener<\/em>.\u00a0 The narrator describes how Bartleby\u2019s desk was placed in a space which had \u201ca lateral view of certain grimy back-yards and bricks, but which, owing to subsequent erections, commanded at present no view at all\u2026\u201d (1489).\u00a0 In addition to creating a dark and ominous atmosphere typical in Dark Romantic writing, Melville shows how working in an office setting that is closed off from the world can potentially be problematic.\u00a0 This sense of isolation also reinforces the idea of the Iron Cage.\u00a0 In this case, the Iron Cage is used to limit distraction in the workplace and optimize production, two goals of any company in a capitalistic society.\u00a0 The fact that this story occurs on Wall Street, America\u2019s center of capitalism, further displays Melville\u2019s issue with our capitalistic society.<\/p>\n With his death at the end of the story, Bartleby becomes a martyr in a sense.\u00a0 His fight against the ideals of capitalistic America including hard work and respect for authority is eventually lost.\u00a0 By killing off Bartleby, Melville displays that the American system failed Bartleby and it is not as flawless as we imagine it to be.\u00a0 With his writing, Herman Melville gave America the sort of reality check it needed at the time.<\/p>\n Works Consulted<\/p>\n Melville, Herman. \u201cBartleby the Scrivener.\u201d The Norton Anthology of American Literature: 1820-1865<\/em>, edited by Nina Baym and Robert S. Levine, W.W. Norton & Company, 2012, pp. 1483-1509.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Herman Melville 1819-1891 Widely known as the \u201cman who lived among the cannibals,\u201d Herman Melville was one of the most famous Dark Romantic writers of the 19th century.\u00a0 As was typical of the Dark Romantics, Melville often criticized Reform writers from the earlier part of the century.\u00a0 Melville still believed that change was needed in … Continue reading Herman Melville<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":198,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[225],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/198"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3492"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3510,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3492\/revisions\/3510"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/adhc.lib.ua.edu\/site\/literarylandscapes\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/12\/HermanMelville-204x300.jpg\")