The Paradise Of Bachelors And The Tartarus Of Maids

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“The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids”


Herman Melville’s, “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” sheds light on the societal changes that go along with industrialization. It allows us a glimpse of the price that is paid for privilege. Melville writes on the reality of human greed and on subsequent separation of the classes.
Herman Melville describes the reality of privilege and the great cost that is paid to attain it. He describes how industrialization changes society and creates a separation between the two classes. The privilege of the upper class in this story is in a sense far removed from the reality of what it took to attain it. They fail to see that the privilege they enjoy has been paid through the sacrifice of the working class. Melville describes this “paradise” as “sweat off another man’s back.” The bachelors take no consideration for the maids that work unceasingly to produce the privilege they enjoy. The maid’s lives do not encompass “paradise,” theirs is a struggle for survival. The conditions and settings are unequal to that which the upper class enjoys. The maids are enslaved to the machines they tend. Melville describes the environment of maids as a tartarus, a type of hell. He describes how the greed of the upper class blinds them to the realities of the conditions, dispositions, and lives that the maids exist in.
Industry was meant to be an economic solution for everyone; instead it served as a wedge. It created a gap between the classes that only grew bigger with time. The privilege that they possess cannot exist without the working class. The “heaven” that they so enjoy was brought courtesy of those they step over. Although the “bachelors” want to be far removed from the “maids,” it can never be done. It is the need for the “maids” that privileges the upper class with their “paradise.”...