However, Bartleby’s behavior creates a dead-end for the lawyer. The chambers give us a clue about the mentality of the lawyer who stays on the surface of things and sacrifices the good working conditions of himself and his employees in order to stay closer to Wall-Street. The lawyer’s office is in Wall Street, the American exchange stock market and the place of the individual in American Society. He is a man who does not really want to struggle in his life, so he never addresses a jury or draws down public applause, as he admits: “I am a man who, from his youth upwards, has been filled with a profound conviction that the easiest way of life is the best” (Melville, 2364). This society creates a hierarchy, where American elitism is differentiated from working class people, who struggle 15 hours per day to earn their living.Īs far as the lawyer is concerned, his identity is separable from his business as a servicer of the rich. America of the north is turned into an urban society, which, apart from the increase in the population, creates new working conditions. Through the individual dead-ends of the five protagonists, we are going to throw light on the bleak picture of the American society of the 19th century.ĭuring the industrial revolution, the socio-economic and cultural conditions are profoundly affected. The fact that the protagonists, both the scriveners and the narrator, are “divided”, mentally and physically, by the socio-economic circumstances, gives us a clue about the mentality of the market economy in the American Society. Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener, A Story of Wall-Street” is a dark romanticism story, the aim of which is to disrupt the myth of the American dream of success, and bring to the surface the fragmentation of the individual and the society. Eu podia dar esmolas ao seu corpo, mas o seu corpo não lhe doía era a sua alma que sofria, e ela estava fora do meu alcance.The reality behind the myth of the American dream of success O que vi naquela manhã convenceu-me de que o escrivão era vítima de um mal inato e incurável. Quando afinal percebe que tal piedade não significa um socorro eficaz, o bom senso compele a alma a desvencilhar-se dela. Para uma pessoa sensivel, a piedade é quase sempre uma dor. Na verdade, provém de uma certa impotência em remediar um mal excessivo e orgânico. Erram os que afirmam que é devido apenas ao egoísmo inerente ao coração humano. To ponto mas, em certos casos especiais, não passam disso. É tão verdadeiro e ao mesmo tempo tão terrivel o fato de que, ao vermos ou presenciarmos a miséria, os nossos melhores sentimentos são despertados até um cer “As minhas primeiras emoções tinham sido a melancolia mais pura e a compaixão mais sincera, mas na mesma proporção em que o desamparo de Bartleby crescia na minha fantasia, aquela melancolia se transformava em medo, e a compaixão, em repulsa. I might give alms to his body but his body did not pain him it was his soul that suffered, and his soul I could not reach.” What I saw that morning persuaded me that the scrivener was the victim of innate and incurable disorder. And when at last it is perceived that such pity cannot lead to effectual succor, common sense bids the soul rid of it. To a sensitive being, pity is not seldom pain. It rather proceeds from a certain hopelessness of remedying excessive and organic ill. They err who would assert that invariably this is owing to the inherent selfishness of the human heart. So true it is, and so terrible too, that up to a certain point the thought or sight of misery enlists our best affections but, in certain special cases, beyond that point it does not. “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew to my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.
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